Europe's Agricultural Revolution
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
Also published by United Press International (UPI)
Malignant Self Love - Buy the Book - Click HERE!!!
Relationships with Abusive Narcissists - Buy the e-Books - Click HERE!!!
READ THIS: Scroll down to review a complete list of the
articles - Click on the blue-coloured
text!
Bookmark this Page - and SHARE IT with Others!
Written November 27, 2002
Updated June 2005
The June 2005 budget summit in Brussels foundered on the issue of farm support and subsidies which now consume directly 46.2% of the European Union's (EU) funds. Tony Blair refused to let go of Britain's infamous rebate (amounting to two thirds of its net contributions to the community's coffers) unless and until these handouts (which Britain's dilapidated agriculture does not enjoy) are slashed. This followed close on the hills of the rejection of the proposed EU constitution in French and the Dutch referenda in May-June 2005.
One of the undeniable benefits of the enlargement of the European Union (EU) accrues to its veteran members rather than to the acceding countries. The EU is forced to revamp its costly agricultural policies and attendant bloated bureaucracy. This, undoubtedly, will lead, albeit glacially, to the demise of Europe's farming sector as we know it.
Contrary to public misperceptions, Europe is far more open to trade than the United States. According to the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), its exports amount to 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) compared to America's 11.5 percent. It is also the world's second largest importer. In constant dollar terms, it is the world's largest trader.
A Trade Policy Review released in 2002 by the World Trade Organization (WTO) mentions two notable exceptions: farm products and textiles. Europe's average tariff on agricultural produce is four times those levied on non-agricultural goods. Yet, a number of trends conspire to break the eerie stranglehold of 3-4 percent of Europe's population - its farmers - on its budget and political process.
The introduction of the euro rendered prices transparent across borders and revealed to the European consumer how expensive his food is. Scares like the mishandled mad cow disease dented consumer confidence in both politicians and bureaucrats. But, most crucially, the integration of the countries of east and central Europe with their massive agricultural sectors makes the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) untenable.
The CAP guzzles close to half of the EU's $98 billion budget. Recent, controversial reforms, introduced by the European Commission, call for a gradual reduction and diversion of CAP outlays from directly subsidizing production to WTO-compatible investments in agricultural employment, regional development, environment and training and research. Unnoticed, support to farmers by both the EU and member governments has already declined from $120 billion in 1999 to $110 billion in 2000. This decrease has since continued unabated.
Still, the EU is unable to provide the new members with the same level of farm subsidies it doles out to the current 15 members. Close to one quarter of Poland's population is directly or indirectly involved in agriculture - ten times the European average. The agreement struck between Germany and France in September 2002 and adopted in a summit Brussels in October freezes CAP spending in its 2006 level until 2013.
This may further postpone the identical treatment much coveted by the applicants. Theoretically, subsidies for the farm sectors of the new members will increase and subsidies flowing to veteran members will decrease until they are equalized at around 80 percent of present levels throughout the EU by the end of the next budget period in 2013.
But, in reality, the entire CAP stands to be renegotiated in 2005-6. No one can guarantee the outcome of this process, especially when coupled with the Doha round of trade liberalization. The offers made now to the candidate countries are not only mean but also meaningless.
A tweak by Denmark, the president of the EU in the second half of 2002, to peg support for farmers in the new members at two fifths the going rate, won a cautious welcome by the then candidate countries. Some of this novel subventionary largesse will be deducted from a fund for rural development in the new members. Additionally, national governments will be allowed to top up inadequate EU dollops with governmental budget funds.
Even this parsimonious offer - still disputed by the majority of contemporary EU members - will cost the Union an extra $500 million a year. It also fails to tackle equally weighty wrangles about production quotas, EU protectionist "safeguard" measures, import tariffs imposed by the new members against heavily subsidized European farm products, reduced value added taxes on agricultural produce and referential periods and yields - the bases for calculating EU transfers.
It also ignores the distinct - and thorny - possibility that the new members will end up as net contributors to the budget.
Quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Sandor Richter, a senior researcher with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, concluded that the first intake of ten new members, concluded in May 2004, will end up underwriting at least $410 million of the EU's budget in the first year of membership alone. With the GDP per capita of most candidates at one fifth the EU's, this would be a perverse, socially unsettling and politically explosive outcome.
Aware of this, the European Commission denies any intention to actually accept cash from the New Europe. Their net contributions would remain theoretical, it pledges implausibly. Yet, as long as a country such as Poland is incapable of absorbing - disseminating and utilizing - more than 28 percent of the aid it is currently entitled to - veteran EU members rightly question its administrative ability to tackle much larger provisions - c. $20 billion in the first three years after accession.
The prolonged and irascible debate has taken its toll. In some new member countries, pro-EU sentiment is on the wane. Leszek Miller, then Poland's prime minister, told the PAP news agency in late 2002 that Poland should contribute to the EU less than it receives in agricultural subsidies. And what if not? "Nobody would be overly concerned if Poland did not enter the EU together with the first group of new members."
Hungary echoes this argument. Almost two thirds of respondents in surveys conducted by the EU in Estonia, Latvia, Slovenia and Lithuania are undecided about EU membership or opposed to it altogether. The situation in the Czech Republic is not much improved. Only Hungary stalwartly supports the EU's eastern tilt.
Opinion polls periodically conducted by GfK Hungaria, a market research group owned by GfK Germany, paint a more mixed picture. On the one hand, even in countries with a devout following of EU accession, such as Romania, support for integration has declined this year. Support in Hungary and Poland, on the other hand, picked up.
Yet, the EU can't seem to get its act together. According to the Danish paper, Berlingske Tidende, Danish prime minister in 2002, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, ruled out a "take it or leave it" ultimatum to the new members. There will be "real negotiations", he insisted. Not so, says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish president of the EU until Dec 31, 2002: "The room for maneuver in negotiations will be very limited ... We have a certain framework, and we stick to it."
Yet, disenchantment should not be exaggerated. Naturally, flood-affected farmers throughout the region - from the Czech Republic to Poland - are vigorously protesting their unequal treatment and the compromises their governments were arm-twisted into making. Still, according to a survey released in December 2001 by the European Commission, 60 percent of the denizens of the accession countries supported it.
As the endgame nears, the parties to the negotiations are posturing, though. EU enlargement commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, argued in November 2002 against equalizing support for Poland's 6 million farmers with the subsidies given to the EU's 8 million smallholders. In a typical feat of incongruity he said it will prevent them from modernizing and alienate other professions.
Franz Fischler, the Austrian EU's agriculture commissioner, hinted that miserly production quotas for cereals, meat and dairy products, offered by the EU to the new members, can be augmented. The EU presently provides the new members with funding, within the Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) to support farm investments, to boost processing and marketing of farm and fishery products and to bankroll infrastructure improvements. Hungarian farmers, for instance, are entitled to up to $38 million of SAPARD money annually.
In a thinly veiled threat, Fischler included this in a speech he made in an official visit to Estonia in late 2002:
"The EU enlargement countries should be pleased with the 25 per cent agriculture subsidies, as the member states have not agreed even on that yet, therefore this should be the first goal and only after that can further subsidies be discussed ... It would not be very wise to tell the EU member states that accession countries are not pleased, that would not be positive for the whole process."
Small wonder he was whistled down by irate Polish parliamentarians in an address to a joint session of the parliamentary committees for agriculture and European integration in the Sejm. Poland's fractured farm sector is notoriously inefficient. With one quarter of the labor force it produces less than 4 percent of GDP. But the peasants are well represented in the legislature and soaring unemployment - almost one fifth of all adults - makes every workplace count.
In the meantime, the ten new members of the EU have teamed up to present their case in Brussels. Their ministers of finance, foreign affairs and of agriculture, parliamentary deputies in their finance and farm committees - all issued and issue common statements, position papers, briefings and memoranda of understanding. But no one is inclined to take such ad-hoc alliances among the candidate countries seriously. The disparity between their farm sectors is such that it rules out a single voice.
Moreover, the EU is strained to the limit of its habitual consensus-driven decision making. The breakdown of the European mechanism of deliberation was brought into sharp relief by the way in which the future of the CAP was decided in a series of chats between the leaders of France and Germany in a hotel in Brussels in 2002 . Their deal was later rubber stamped, unaltered, in a summit of all EU members in October 2002.
The Union is in constitutional and institutional flux. Small and even medium sized members - such as the United Kingdom - are marginalized. As the EU bloated to 25 countries, a core of leadership failed to emerge. Germany, France, the UK, and Italy - the industrial locomotives of Europe - are at odds and (with the exception of the UK) sputtering.
Decision-making has been reduced to the Council of Ministers handing down blueprints to be fleshed out by the less significant states and by an increasingly sidelined European Commission and a make-believe European Parliament. The constitution which was supposed to restore central authority and participatory democracy is dead in the water.
The countries of central and eastern Europe are and will, for a long time, be second class citizens, tolerated merely because they provide cheap, youthful, labor, raw materials and close-by markets for finished goods. The new members are strategically located between the old continent and booming Asia.
EU enlargement is a thinly disguised exercise in mercantilism tinged with the maudlin ideology of embracing revenant brothers long lost to communism. But beneath the veneer of civility and kultur lurk the cold calculations of realpolitik. The New Europe - the EU's hinterland - would do well to remember this.
Also Read:
Russian Roulette - Russian Agriculture
Copyright Notice
This material is copyrighted.
Free, unrestricted use is allowed on a non
commercial basis.
The author's name and a link to this Website
must be incorporated in any
reproduction of the material for any use and by any means.
Internet: A Medium or a Message?
Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited
Frequently Asked Questions about Narcissism
Write to me: palma@unet.com.mk or narcissisticabuse-owner@yahoogroups.com