CAP—social policy
Sir: How it would simplify things if farmers were machines and not people. Gerald Segal's letter from Brussels (in your issue of March 30) implied that the fundamental problem of the Common Agricultural Policy was its 'social' element, the need to provide the farming population in the Community with a reasonable income.
In fact the CAP, like most agricultural policies, is a balance between the economics of getting food as efficiently as possible and the need to prevent too violent a social revolution in agricultural regions which would in turn affect food supplies as well as depressing the countryside and depopulating whole regions. In providing food as cheaply as possible, the CAP is currently doing well. The policy has been turned upside down by the imposition of export levies on cereals, rice and sugar, so keeping sufficient EEC supplies within the Community to hold prices lower than world prices. As a major importer of these products, Britain has cause to bless the CAP this year. With the prospect of increasingly violent fluctuations in world prices for food, the prospect of stable supplies in the future is not to be lightly rejected.
Continental farmers are undergoing a social and technological revolution in perhaps thirty years which Britain underwent over 200. In the last fifteen years the annual rate at which people in the Six left farming averaged almost 5per cent — 9 million have left in that time; only another 9 million remain. Young people no longer stay on the land; half the agricultural population is over fifty years old in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany. National governments in the Six spent more than £1,000 million on modernising agriculture in 1972, plus another £1,000 million on social measures to help. farmers. The Community's bill for price support came to just under E950 million.
Farm prices depend on the resources of the average farmer and when that farmer has only eight cows (British average, 34) and 25 acres (UK, 75), it is natural that he needs higher prices.
Yet the squeeze on continental farmers is intense. The rate at which their costs have increased, whether of fertiliser, machinery or labour, has consistently outpaced any rise in the official floor prices. In the last eight years the intervention prices have gone up 10 per cent for sugar beet, 11 per cent for wheat and 131 per cent for barley — less than 2 per cent a year on average.
Milk and beef prices have gone up a good deal more, but the target price for milk is still only 29p a gallon — about 2p a gallon more than the highly efficient British dairy farmer is guaranteed. Of course these prices are much lower for a German farmer who has seen his returns in Deutschmarks drop as the currency has been upvalued, than to a British consumer, whose currency has depreciated 35 per cent in those eight years.
Michael Berendt Agricultural Liaison Officer, Commission of the European Communities, 20 Kensington Palace Gardens, London W8
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