It is very much the end of an era for European farming
Mark Twain famously said reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.
This followed a newspaper report of his demise while he was still hale and hearty. After many years covering the twists and turns of European politics, I always through reports of the demise of the CAP would prove “great exaggeration”.
Thanks to fraud, poor budgetary control and a reluctance to accept the need for radical change, it came close over the years, but always survived.
That makes it all the more ironic that just as the CAP is going reasonably well, with a less green and more farmer friendly focus, the European Commission has voted for changes that will effectively kill off the CAP farmers have known since the creation of the then EEC in the 1960s. It has generally been accepted, even by those who backed Brexit, that the policies we ended up with in the UK failed to capitalise for farmers on the opportunities Brexit created.
Instead the CAP improved for farmers in the EU, while our position went the other way.
This was well demonstrated this week when the UFU put out a statement warning that DAERA’s flagship nitrate action programme NAP threatens to impose a 1.5 billion annual cost on a sector that is supposed to be the backbone of the local economy.
On that basis we appear to still be worse off than farmers in the EU we left for the promises of better days after Brexit than even farmers set to lose the CAP as they have known it for decades.
The key difference is that they are losing influence, but not money and the changes for the CAP are being criticised as much by the green lobby as they are by the farming lobby. The CAP was never a perfect policy. It was cumbersome and before the Irish farm commissioner Ray MacSharry reshaped it in the early 1990s, it guaranteed excesses in the shape of milk lakes and beef mountains.
However since then it has operated reasonably well and given farmers in the EU an enviable level of financial security.
This is still there today, thanks to direct payments and the ring-fencing of funding for agriculture. Ironically since the farm protests of last year the policy has become less bureaucratic, less green and more farmer friendly.
Much of this was down to Von der Leyen, who praised farmers for their contribution to food security and the rural economy.
This makes it all the more ironic that it is on her watch a sledgehammer has been taken to a policy previously deemed sacrosanct.
At the end of the day, despite the growth of the original EEC of six countries to 27 today, the CAP was one of very few “common” policies that have stood the test of time over decades. Going is the concept of a “common” agricultural policy that applies across the EU. An argument can be made that this makes sense, since it allows for farm policies better shaped to national situations.
That may be so, but it opens the way to different countries being more or less farmer friendly and makes it more difficult to harmonise rules to maintain an open, single market. The EU disagrees with that view. There will effectively no longer be a CAP. Instead funding for agriculture will be lumped into a new National and Regional Partnership (NRRP) pot, which will be one of three new funding streams for the EU budget.
Each member state will receive a national envelope or guarantee of funding, which it will be free to use within broad rules set down by Brussels.
Under enormous pressure from the pro-farmer agriculture commissioner Christoph Hansen, there is for now a guarantee of around 300 billion euro ring-fenced for direct payments, but this was agreed reluctantly and there is no certainty for the long term. At one level this is a more efficient, less centralised way to allocate and use a huge EU budget.
It is also possible to argue that a common agricultural policy, shaped by post-World War Two thinking and in place since the 1960s and the EEC’s founding Treaty of Rome is no longer relevant as we head well into the 21st century.
It is however very much the end of an era for European farming, when it was politically “special” and had its own unique policy and structures.