Letter: The total madness of EC agricultural policy

Sir: James Gibson-Watt (Letters, 28 November) expresses much understanding for the fate of French farmers post-Gatt. He might equally express understanding for all European Community farmers. There are a lot more French farmers than in any other EC country except Italy, but the continuing process of adjustment will affect all member states' farmers in much the same way.

As yet, it is far from clear just what impact Gatt will have on the Community's farmers. But it is almost certain that it will further accelerate the change in farm structure that has been going on apace for more than two decades, a process of change that had to happen and which will inevitably go on.

Recent CAP reforms are a classic case of one pace forward, two back. It must be right to reduce EC cereal prices further; but what possible justification can there be for paying 'compensation' through an incredibly complex system (thereby inviting more fraud), which in 1996 will involve some arable farmers employing just one man receiving an annual subsidy from the taxpayer of around pounds 80,000?

Many of the reforms, rather than taking farmers nearer to the marketplace, actually direct them farther away from it. Would the marketplace pay a farmer pounds 16 just to keep a young breeding sheep for a year? Before the reform package it had to breed to qualify for the payment. Unsurprisingly, some flockmasters have already worked out that as long as this extraordinary state of affairs persists they will be able to make a living and scarcely have to leave the farmhouse to do so.

French farmers were protesting before the CAP reform package, and after it they redoubled their efforts. Before they know what Gatt will do to them, they are protesting yet more vehemently. But they are not really protesting about a Gatt settlement, they are protesting about the disappearance of a way of life that they see being replaced by something infinitely inferior - for themselves and for many, many others. Emotional and social matters weigh far more heavily than economic ones.

The last 20 years have proved that a successful social and rural infrastructure policy cannot be achieved in the guise of an agricultural policy. It is total madness that so many European bureaucrats and politicians (John Gummer is not among them) still labour under the impression that it can, that they can make water run uphill and achieve the impossible. They cannot; in trying to do so they make matters worse.

The world should be a slightly saner place if we finally get a Gatt settlement. But neither a settlement, nor no settlement, nor any policy born of further CAP reform will rectify what French farmers are really protesting about.

That will require a fundamental change in perceptions, a recognition that not everything can be measured in terms of GDP, economic growth and material values of real wealth, and a recognition that neither their problems nor ours will be put right by devising an ever-more-nightmarishly complex agricultural policy.

Yours sincerely,

SIMON GOURLAY

Knighton, Powys