EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has adapted keenly expected health-check proposals on the EU's farm policy to the current situation of rising food prices, suggesting various ways to help the sector boost production and respond to market demands. Mariann Fischer Boel, EU agriculture commissioner, presented the final version of the farm policy review to the European Parliament on Tuesday (20 May) after a two year-long political debate in national capitals and EU institutions. "Some claim that we're now playing a totally different ball game," she said, referring to an everyday "avalanche of media headlines about rising agricultural prices, their causes and their impact around the world." In a bid to react to the price trends, the EU executive is proposing to abolish current rules on keeping 10 percent of farm land fallow, which could bring four to five million hectares of idle fields back into production. Brussels is also suggesting phasing out milk quotas by April 2015.
Soaring food prices make few problems better - but they could have proved the key to jettisoning the worst excesses of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy. Unfortunately, the European Commission has ducked that chance, although yesterday it showed that it did recognise the desirability, at least as a matter of high theory, of getting the EU to produce more crops, after decades of trying to persuade it to do exactly the opposite. Its biggest proposals do not much suit Britain, because they would limit the benefit going to large farmers, of which Britain has many, while helping small ones. Germany and the Czech Republic don't much like them either, for the same reason, and so they may well never survive as policy. But the biggest objection to them is that they waste this opportunity, with cash showering down on the world's farmers, to change the rules. They fit perfectly in the grand tradition of the CAP - of using subsidies to sustain an otherwise unsustainable way of life while trying to conceal this purpose.
Soaring food prices make few problems better - but they could have proved the key to jettisoning the worst excesses of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy.
Unfortunately, the European Commission has ducked that chance, although yesterday it showed that it did recognise the desirability, at least as a matter of high theory, of getting the EU to produce more crops, after decades of trying to persuade it to do exactly the opposite.
Its biggest proposals do not much suit Britain, because they would limit the benefit going to large farmers, of which Britain has many, while helping small ones. Germany and the Czech Republic don't much like them either, for the same reason, and so they may well never survive as policy.
But the biggest objection to them is that they waste this opportunity, with cash showering down on the world's farmers, to change the rules. They fit perfectly in the grand tradition of the CAP - of using subsidies to sustain an otherwise unsustainable way of life while trying to conceal this purpose.
So I read this piece to check that was what Bronwen Maddox meant. Great (not) was my surprise to find that this is a different sense of "unsustainable":
European Union misses rare opportunity to change farming rules | Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing - Times Online
If Europe is going to have farming, then it should be efficient, and produce food as cheaply as possible.
Big industrial farms, that's what's sustainable.
And this is how the means produce The End. ;)
Big industrial farms, that's what's sustainable
But they're not, that's what's sad about this. Big farms relying on petroleum-fuelled large machinery to spread large amounts of petroleum-derived fertilzers and sundry other chemicals to help grow GM-industrial crops which are then shipped halfway around the world is simply not a practice that is going to survive $200 - 300 oil/barrel.
It's the very farms and practices they intend to destroy that will sustain us. This is not just homogenisation for corporate benefit, this is a vindictive short-termist attempt to reduce the viability of european food production through the 21st century. keep to the Fen Causeway
