FRANCE: In a move which is sure to irritate the French government and farm unions, the former Agriculture Minister, Mr Jean Glavany, has publicly defended the plans of the EU Agriculture Commissioner to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
Mr Glavany, a socialist deputy in the National Assembly who left the Agriculture Ministry in May, is the only French official to have welcomed Mr Franz Fischler's proposals. "Some of us have been fighting for years to decouple CAP subsidies from production," Mr Glavany wrote in Le Monde on August 3rd, "and now we're supposed to sulk over the Commission's proposals?"
In his Bastille Day television interview, President Jacques Chirac denounced Mr Fischler's plan as a "facade" constructed by Germany, Britain and the Netherlands to decrease their EU contributions, but Mr Glavany says arguments used by the new centre-right government are flawed.
There is no evidence that "hundreds of thousand of farms would be threatened" by the Fischler proposals, he writes. Small and medium-sized farms have been disappearing for years because the CAP favours intensive production.
"Eighty per cent of subsidies go to 20 per cent of farms - the biggest ones. That is why they are lying to us when they say that changing this unfair system would threaten hundreds of thousands of farms. It's not true."
It is also disingenuous of farm unions to claim they want fair prices, not subsidies, when they know world market prices are well below what they earn with the CAP.
"It would be better to admit it: yes, European and French agriculture must be subsidised. That's the price society must pay for a living countryside that is productive and maintained." However, by helping large scale agri-business, he adds, present policies "leave small farmers to die".
Mr Glavany finds fault with the way the present government defends the CAP. "France must not isolate herself in a defensive, conservative position," he says. It "must discuss it and stop considering that the others must pay and shut up."
The Raffarin government claims to be humble and modest. "Prove it and start by respecting our European partners."
It is wrong for Paris to push states waiting to join the EU towards intensive production, by giving them the illusion they will benefit from the present CAP system, Mr Glavany continues. France claims it is fighting budget deficits. "Prove it," he challenges the government.
Finally, developing countries denounce the protectionism of the CAP at a time when Paris claims that development aid is a national priority. "Prove it," Mr Glavany concludes.