For most of the last decade I’ve been saying that the EU’s agricultural policy needed a major overhaul and it’s beginning to look as though my predictions are coming true:
Unless France reforms agriculture in depth, farmers, meat purchasers and analysts say that some sectors — notably breeders — are set to go the way of coal mining, and disappear.
“The entire breeding sector, from pork to beef to milk producers, faces a huge competitiveness challenge,†Pascal Viné, the general delegate of the Coop de France group of agricultural firms, told POLITICO. “We’ve reached a point where we can no longer play for time and hope that prices will pick up.â€
The latest crisis is partly explained by European Union economic sanctions on Russia, a huge export market for EU meat that has largely been shut off to farmers. Unable to sell to the east, farmers have flooded the European market with cheap meat products to drain supply.
While French industrial purchasers normally agree to absorb a set volume of local production at controlled prices agreed during roundtables, this time some of them balked over the huge difference between the cost of French meat and products from Germany or Spain — around 30 euro cents per kilo.
Let’s start by noting that when you get right down to it the purpose of the European Union is to provide agricultural subsidies to French farmers and subsidized export markets for German manufacturers. The purpose of the euro, on the other hand, is as a credible attack vehicle on the dollar.
There was never any way that French agricultural subsidies would ever survive an increasingly efficient German agricultural sector let alone the admission of Romania, a country about the size of France much of it devoted to agriculture.
