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Today's Top News
Farming Policy: An End to French Hypocrisy?
Sarkozy makes historic move to divert European subsidies from rich cereal ranches to small traditional farms
PARIS - fter 46 years of shovelling farm subsidies to its richer, more polluting farmers, France yesterday took a historic step towards a greener and fairer European agriculture policy.
A farmer from the Limousin region with his cows in front of the Eiffel tower at the start of the 46th Paris International Farm Show, which runs until 1 March. Paris announced that from next year it would confiscate over 20 per cent of the billions of euros of European taxpayers' money paid to its ranch-like cereals farms and divert the cash to hill farmers, grazing land, shepherds and organic agriculture.
The announcement brings to an end almost half-a-century of official hypocrisy in which French governments have talked about protecting "family farms" and "quality food" but allowed the bulk of European largesse to flow to chemical-assisted, hedge-free, cereals-ranching in northern, central and eastern France.
Although Brussels first encouraged governments to "rob" rich farmers to subsidise small, traditional farms four years ago, Paris remained the only European government to insist that large cereals farms should receive their full, traditional EU payments. The Agriculture Minister, Michel Barnier, announced yesterday that this policy would end from next year.
The largest French cereals farms - which can receive up to ¤800,000 (£700,000) in annual subsidies - will lose 20 per cent of their EU cash. Others will be "taxed" at a lower rate. Overall, a total of ¤1,400m a year will be transferred from big farms to traditional farms and schemes to promote biodiversity.
The money will be used, above all, to help struggling beef, sheep and goat farmers and to encourage the slowly gathering movement towards "bio" or organic agriculture in France.
President Nicolas Sarkozy believes this historic shift in French attitudes is essential to preserve what remains of traditional farming communities in the Alps and in central, western and southern France. His government also recognises that a change from an increasingly indefensible policy of "big farmers first" is essential if the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to survive. "This is the price we must pay to defend the CAP," M. Barnier said.
A radical re-examination of the CAP is due in four years. President Sarkozy recognises that he can no longer do what President Jacques Chirac did: defend the CAP as a shield for small, traditional farms and quality food while the bulk of subsidies went to wheat, barley and rice ranches.
Under the present rules, the 10 largest French farms receive an average of ¤500,000 each. The smallest farms receive an average of ¤500 each.
Yesterday's policy shift does not presage a weakening of French support for the CAP. A cynical interpretation might be that France is preparing a more logical and eco-friendly argument to hold on to the ¤10bn it receives each year from the CAP budget.
Small farmers' groups complained that the reforms did not go far enough. Régis Hochart of the Confédération Paysanne said: "This is an important advance but those with the highest revenues should still be contributing more."
On the other hand, the change in French attitudes does suggest that it may be easier to rebuild the CAP in 2013: moving away from subsidies for mass production of food and towards aid for small rural communities, traditional livestock farming and organic agriculture.
While criticising the very existence of the CAP, successive British government have also tended to defend the flow of payments to larger cereals farms and have resisted the movement towards direct subsidies for smaller, more "traditional" forms of agriculture.
Although France already has the fifth-largest acreage of non-chemical, or organic farms in the EU, it lags behind other European countries in terms of percentage of "bio" production. Only two per cent of French farm land and vineyards is officially regarded as "organic": i.e. free of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides.
During a visit on Saturday to the Paris agricultural show, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that a wind of change was about to blow through the French countryside.
"We have animal rearing farms which are suffering. We have hill areas which are suffering," he said. Farm subsidies must be reallocated to make the payments "more equitable", he said. "And because they are fairer, they will be permanent."
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6 Comments so far
Show AllUSA Farmer Perspective Get a clue folks.
Ok, this could have been written, almost, about US farm policy, (and it often has been).
FARM BILL to be SMARTER than a FIFTH GRADER
1. Farm grains and other main commodities lack price responsiveness on both supply (ie. Iowa farmers don't leave their fertile land fallow when prices are low, they plant it all every year, high or low) and demand (you don't eat five meals just because it's cheap, or eat only one if it's more expensive, [except if you can't afford not to starve]) sides. So prices are usually below the cost of production, ie. over the past 130+ years (with periodic exceptions). But then along comes the New Deal and Henry Wallace, and, without any subsidies, the government intervenes to help US agriculture run like a successful business, preventing price crashes on the bottom side and preventing spikes on the top side, with room for the market to adjust itself within these limits, within a range in the middle.
2. Ok That was 1930s-1952. Meanwhile agribusiness grain buyers fought to get the stuff at below cost. Finally they won some changes under Eisenhower. Then they lowered the bottom, the price floor mechanisms, 1953-1995, gradually lower and lower as a de facto subsidy to agribusiness. At one point agribusiness got other businesses to sign on to the idea that running farmers off the land would drive down wage levels in the cities. The Committee for Economic Development in "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture," called for lowering New Deal price floors in order to force 1/3 of the farm labor force off the farm within five years. Basically they won politically. So we moved toward further dumping on LDC farmers, exporting at a loss just to provide below cost grains to agribusiness buyers. Tufts University, Timothy Wise (cf Elanor Starmer) has done the best recent work on these gains, $2.5 billion (1997-2005) (hidden, it comes from the market, not from the government) each for Tyson and Smithfield to take value added livestock production away from diversified grain farmers with help from below cost feeds.
3. Who fought vigorously against these outrages, this start of dumping on LDCs (which are 70%+ rural) starting in the 1950s? The left? Urban progressives? At the forefront was the National Farmers Organization (Mad as Hell by Willis Rowell). They lost politically (not a big enough movement, not run well enough to bring urban justice folks on board). But it was a start of the movement we have today.
4. Against this massive political heat, they came up with a way to give even more to agribusiness, and while clobbering farmers over the head even more visciously, to hand out compensatory "safety nets" (as they've taught urban food activists and others to call them today). Starting in 1961, continued with a flair by Nixon Butz, compensatory subsidies were more than doubled by Reagan Block. (European CAP has had the same low world prices, and eventually, compensatory subsidies.) But get this, price floors were lowered more than the amount of the compensatory subsidies. Subsidy "safety nets" clobbered farmers with lower and lower total incomes (market plus subsidies).
5. Along come EWG and the farm subsidy database. Great to expose this mess? Well, it led half of the movement for justice to claim that the compensatory subsidies were the problem, not the lack of New Deal nonsubsidy price floors (& etc.). Subsidies were largely based on the fact that the larger the farm, the larger the losses (except for some economies of size). But it looked hugely unjust. As in this article, no mention is typically made of the fact that subsidies have rarely even compensate farmers for the losses of dropping and eliminating price floors and supply management.
6. Then we have this article and much more, half the movement bickering about who gets subsidies. Agribusiness relishes this, and laughs all the way to the bank. "Divide and conquer! Stupendous success! THEIR movement is on OUR side! Ha, ha ha ha!" So look at the many progressive organizations that mentioned none of this in their footnoted documents prior to the 2007-2008 farm bill (Church World Service, RESULTS, Oxfam, National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Farm Policy Project, Bread for the World and their Left-Right Coalition, American Farmland Trust, Environmental Working Group. Nowhere do these groups say: make agribusiness pay the subsidies, (fair market prices) so WE in the USA don't pay subsidies on THEIR exports and domestic use. (And ditto for the European CAP.
7. So then US fruits and veggies (as in this article) call for the same privileges! Get a clue folks! Allow agribusiness to exploit them as much as grains have been exploited? Are they off their rockers? Look at return on equity, look at shares of the food dollar, look at percent of parity. Everywhere you look fruits and veggies may be exploited too, but they're doing better than grains. And you want to divide the movement, pitting us against each others. (Agribusiness: "Let's just have them fight among themselves, while we vacation in the luxury resorts of the world." Hey, see that guy up on the flagpole. See him burning the American flag. You say he looks like a U.S. farmer. No, he's the head of Cargill, or is it ADM, or is it Bunge, etc. exporting our grain at half price to destroy the economies of the US, the EU, and LDCs. Hey, didn't you see him park his Learjet at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington D.C.?
Join nffc.net, IATP, Food and Water Watch, La Via Campesina, Grassroots International, Rural Coalition, not inadvertently pro agribusiness groups.
Brad, what many provinces have in Canada are Marketing boards for various products. This is an addition to the Canadian Wheat board which markets grain products on the behalf of Canadian farmers.
The marketing boards set quotas to ensure there a floor price for things like eggs and milk to ensure farmers can make profits without subsidies.
The Wheat Board basically busy the grain from farmers as a sort of Monopoly and then sells it on the World market.
Both are under attack by American farmers groups as "subsidies" under NAFTA.
Canadian Consumers of farm products complain that food prices in Canada too high because of this and some shop over the border.
Is what you are advocating similar to this?
I'm advocating for, first of all, above zero market prices, and with a reasonable return.
U.S. policy is to lose money on these farm exports so that agribusiness buyers get secretly subsidized. Since we have dominated export market share for some key commodities, it impacts the whole world, driving down farm prices to below costs. I'm against that.
Canada is not as big. Brazill now is biggest in soybeans. We all need to work together, like OPEC, but not to allow speculation on the top side.
So I'm for US policy and international cooperation on supply management and price floors for the bottom, and price ceilings and reserves on the top. EU was for this in years past, but the US insisted on losing money on exports and wouldn't do it. The Africa Group at WTO is calling for this sort of thing.
These are policies for storable commodities. (For sugar we still have these policies, but sugar is only storable after it is refined, so it's a little different.
For non storable commodities we have (at least since the New Deal) marketing orders like you say. They too can be inadequate, inadequately implemented, and I support good ones for fruits and vegetables, milk, etc.
Keep in mind that any "attack" by "American farmers groups" is only describing certain groups, and may not be supported by the majority of American farmers. Only certain messages get through the mainstream media, or even the progressive media.
There is plenty of support in the U.S. and worldwide for fair prices for farmers in Canada and everywhere.
Agribusiness has all sorts of spin to try to get the public here to support the US providing them with below cost (ie. half price) raw materials, even as we lose money on exports. They want every one to bicker over subsidies, as in the article here, to keep their own bigger defacto subsidization hidden and unopposed. And their below cost gains are not compensations for losses, like the visible subsidies, they're pure gains.
So, for just these reasons, the argument you mention is pushed by the secret benefactors: as you say: "Canadian Consumers of farm products complain that food prices in Canada too high because of this and some shop over the border." And yes, we lose money on the "farm share" of what Canadians buy here, so yes, it's cheaper. Here's how I counter this argument here. Mainly, consumers will really support fair prices that eliminate subsidies (if it's explained to them in the mainstream media) because under the agribusiness system they're paying subsidies both on what they consume and on what is exported (exported as grain and exported as grain that's processed into food items, feed into meat, processed into ethanol, processed into many other products. You see, it's just agribusiness spin. It's nonsense.
Also, since Least Developed Countries are 70%+ rural on average, we're deforming and killing people with these policies. (We lost money on major farm grains and cotton, vs. full costs, most of the time 1981-2006, USDA: Economic Research Service, "Commodity Costs and Returns: U.S. and Regional Cost and Return Data" http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/CostsAndReturns/testpick.htm). We're also destroying them as possible consumers of our exports. Sheer agribusiness nonsense. Again, this makes no sense to consumers anywhere who hear the facts.
Additionally, "farm share" in the US has fallen below 8% (if input share is taken out from what's usually called "farm share). Actually input share is more than double the farm share. Further, for grains, for products like corn flakes and wheat bread, the farm share is much smaller, and may be as low as 1%. So doubling farm prices would likely only result in a 1% increase in the price of these products. The other 99% is mostly for the agribusiness output sector. So agribusiness spin has the public blaming farmers for increases beyond the 1% and ignoring their own 99% for these products. So you see, I have little sympathy with these nonsensical arguments. My advocacy here is to get progressives to stop siding with agribusiness on these and similar issues, since they claim to oppose these injustices. Fine, just learn the real issues and oppose the real injustices.
USDA figures farm share and market share (output complex share, Cargill, ADM, Tyson, Smithfield, Walmart). They don't take out input share (ie. Monsanto, John Deere, DuPont), so "farm share" appears three times larger than it really is. Still, USDA has numbers for shares of specific products like corn flakes and wheat bread. I take those numbers and then estimate the input share on corn and wheat production, to get the figures I cite as estimates (the 1%)
Stewart Smith has done the work taking out input share. For example, see "Sustainable agriculture and public policy," Maine Policy Review (1993). Volume 2, Number 1 by Stewart Smith, University of Maine
http://denali dot asap.um.maine.edu:16080/mcs/files/pdf_mpr/SmithS_V2N1.pdf (replace the word "dot" with "."
So here we are, losing, half of us regurgitating agribusiness spin against the other half of us. And I post on and on and on against it, to bring us all back together, to quickly double the size of our movement. (And see my zspace blog, http://www dot zcommunications.org/zspace/bradwilson)
The French can do this despite having a right wing Prez. Why? Maybe because they hit the streets and show their government who's boss. The difference is that their MSM public opinion makers are not just corporate propaganda arms so the French get opposing views and are able to make better judgements.
A right-winger in France is not the same as a right-winger in the US. Sarkozy may be pro-business but he's not anti-farmer in the way that business leaders in the US are.
q
Uhh, the French have been favouring big Agri for DECADES. Even when they had left wing presidents.
Charles de Gaulle's famous statement "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese" has pretty much dictated French agricultural policy for decades. For example, small farmers / producers of cheese in France have been complaining for a long time about how the French government favours the big industrial producers of cheese.
For all their talk about quality food, small farmers, the French have been hypocrites paying lip service.
From the article
"Under the present rules, the 10 largest French farms receive an average of ¤500,000 each. The smallest farms receive an average of ¤500 each."
"The largest French cereals farms – which can receive up to ¤800,000 (£700,000) in annual subsidies – will lose 20 per cent of their EU cash."
So, the big farms are still going to receive a lot of subsidies.