NIXON, DELORS AND THE PADDY FACTOR

Boris Johnson reveals the potent mixture of politics and personalities at the heart of the oil-seed feud between Brussels and Washington

Brussels BY 8.40 ON THE NIGHT of Monday 9 November the chauffeurs were getting rest- less in the lobby of the Charlemagne build- ing, the fetid beige block where, week in, week out, the 12 governments of the EEC pass laws for their 340 million citizens. It was an hour past their suppertime; where was Douglas Hurd? Where was Roland Dumas?

Was it the tragedy of Yugoslavia that was keeping them? Was it the collapse of Rus- sia that detained the two statesmen, argu- ing furiously, antiphonally, for an extra hour while the aroma of 200 pent-up jour- nalists and chauffeurs grew yet more lan- gorous below? Was it Somalia? Hell, no. It was little, round, black beads.

It was a crop the size, shape and greasy feel of no. 4 shot, which has ripped through Europe's tissue-paper unity and brought the world to the brink of a trade war. It is a quarrel which could cost M. Jacques Delors, Commission president, his job.

If France decides to destroy the negotia- tions, leaving `la chaise vide', invoking the `Luxembourg compromise', or some such rigmarole, it would he the end of the EEC as we have known it for the last eight years; and, a fortiori, the end of the remaining credibility of the Maastricht Treaty.

To those who think this might be no bad thing, I hasten to say that this eventuality is, alas, only slightly less probable than the extinction of the world trading system. How has it all happened? Like many things, oil-seed rape is blamed unfairly on that reforming US pres- ident, Richard Milhous Nixon. It is thanks to Nixon, say British oil-seed-growers, that its flowers shimmer over almost exactly one million acres of Britain, so that in May our country, from the air above Southend, looks like a monstrous gingham tablecloth. You hay-fever sufferers, you aesthetes, You visually affronted ramblers, Nixon is Your villain; Nixon, say the oil-seed-grow- ers, blotched this cadmium yellow on to the rural canvas; filled your noses with this sickly and, above all, un-British odour. Thomas Hardy, to be sure, sometimes mentions 'rape-seed' in his novels, but scholars concur he means a kind of cab- bage.

Towards the end of her reign, the crop was even a minor obsession of Mrs Thatch- er. !She was always going on at me about oil-seed,' says one Foreign Office man. —We must cut back. England used to be a green and pleasant land," .she used to say to me.' No doubt, in the FO, they remind-

ed her of Nixon's perfidy.

In 1972, Nixon embargoed exports of soya — America's main oil-seed — to Europe. After a failed harvest in north and south America, the price of soya cattle feed had ratcheted up the price of cows, to the point where American housewives launched a beef boycott. For 36 terrible hours, as the soya embargo held, it looked as though Europe's cows and sheep would go hungry, its chips unfried. In fact, all orders were met, Nixon recanted the following day, and Congress passed a bill outlawing all such embargoes in future. But Europe, conveniently, has never forgotten it. When I tackled Mr Ray MacSharry, the farm commissioner, on his return from the abortive negotiations in Chicago last week, and suggested that the Americans might have a point on oil-seeds, his nostrils tightened in momentary agita- tion. 'Remember 1972,' he said thickly. `We're at least allowed to produce a strate- gic quantity.'

It was not always strategic, this crop. When the biotechnicians first started fool- ing with oil-seed rape in northern Europe in the 1960s, there were only 145 acres of the plant in Britain, in north Bucks and Northamptonshire. But after what we must call the Great Soya Shock of 1972 oil- seeds, say the ministers, the farmers, the lobbies, and MacSharry, became a feature of national security.

The graph of indigenous production rises almost vertically, under the spur of the new Common Market subsidies, worth 67 per cent of the crop's market value. Europe now produces 13 million tonnes per year, for oil, feed, and other purposes. Seven million tonnes are rape, grown in the north, with the rest divided between sun- flower and soya in the south of the Com- munity.

If the comparison was not so absurd, one would be tempted to analogise with the oil shocks of the same time, and the conse- quent accelerated hunt for North Sea oil. But the comparison is absurd.

Commission officials become vague when probed about the curious doctrine of `Community preference', so often invoked by Mr MacSharry. What is the purpose of this Euro-autarchy? Does he believe that the world's increasingly efficient oil-seed producers, in Latin America and Efta, would conspire to keep their cut-price seeds off the EEC market, if the EEC let them in?

Are oil-seeds, like coal, to be stockpiled against adversity? If that were so, why are they not kept in intervention silos, like grain in pre-war Hitlerian Germany? No, do not blame Nixon; blame two atavistic European instincts: to keep farmers on the land, and, bluntly, to assert ourselves against the Americans.

Until recently, in his eyrie in the EEC Commission, the head of the oil-seeds divi- sion, a man called Scoratti, would play a game of space invaders which might have been called 'Stop the US Soya'. Every 12 hours, he would note rape's Rotterdam spot-price of US shipments, totalling 6.5 million tonnes per year, and adjust the EEC intervention price to prevent our farmers from ever being undercut. New rules ensure a fixed support price, but the deterrent principle is the same.

After eight years of M. Delors, who calls Washington a `big elephant', it is not sur- prising that there is a strong element of anti-Americanism in Brussels, a sense of le defi americain. In Delors' France, of course, which produces the most rape-seed in Europe, with 1.6 million acres under production, agricultural protection and anti-Americanism mingle most potently.

But the rhetoric of our own John Gum- mer is not far behind. Indeed, the US administration, and especially its trade rep- resentative, Carla Hills, regard him as the most virulent Euro-nut of the 12 agricultur- al ministers. Listen to the arrogance of Gummer's jibe that the United States is the `world's second greatest trading power'; the frank enjoyment of Europe's success, by spending billions of pounds in export refunds, in capturing US grain markets overseas.

While Congress fumes at Europe's unwillingness to pay more for its own defence, Europe pays $32 billion per year on farm subsidies against a US total of eight billion, and produces considerably less food.

In Brussels, frankly, they relish it. As one official put it, 'Stuff the Americans and their soya beans.' When MacSharry or his co-negotiator on the farm talks, the desic- cated Dutchman Frans Andriessen, stand before the mirror, they can truthfully tell themselves that they are plenipotentiaries mandated by the two countries, equals in protocol of Washington cabinet ministers.

World opinion? Who cares? The EEC has now lost two Gatt rulings over oilseeds, adjudged by three independent experts, once in 1988 and once in 1991, without bat- ting an eye. (Brussels is not at all bashful about ignoring the international organisa- tions to which the EEC belongs — it has also been condemned for wild overfishing, with similar lack of impact, by the North Atlantic Fisheries Organisation). It is Europe right or wrong, contra mundum. As Mr MacSharry told me, heaving with emo- tion, before addressing the European par- liament, `EEC is EEC.'

So as the trade war impends, there is a certain chop-smacking machismo in the agriculture department, directorate-general six, as they contemplate the retaliatory tar- iffs against US peanut butter and other goodies. 'We can hit them harder than they can hit us,' boasted one official. Events in the last few days, and, I should imagine, in the coming few weeks, will show just what vanity that is.

Europe would lose an agricultural trade war with the United States, not just because American farmers are bigger, with deeper pockets, but, among other things, because of the question mark over the 150,000 US Nato troops in Europe's cen- tral area. There is a connection between grain silos and missile silos; like it or not, M. Delors, the US in the end has the lever- age.

As the last few days have shown, more- over, the EEC simply does not have the cohesiveness to fight. With his shameless pork-barrelling for France, Delors is only just discovering what he has taken on: last week, for instance, saw the emergence in Brussels of the Irish mafia.

The Commission president is famously well served by Pascal Lamy, his bower boy chef de cabinet, and the dog-like devotion of the French gauleiters dotted about the Commission. But if there is one gang more clannish and alarming than the 'Lamy net- work' it is the men you see in Kitty O'Shea's (the Brussels one) with rug-like hair and laughing eyes being glad-handed by Ray MacSharry.

`He forgot the paddy factor, all right,' says one, grinding out his cigarette in that notorious pub. As Brussels descends into stasis, into an acknowledged civil war, the micks have played it rough. Like a cat-and- mouse game, like Euro-sceptics versus the Prime Minister, they reckon they have at last got Delors on the run. From Dublin faxes appear alleging compacts between Pascal Lamy and Bill Clinton to scotch the Gatt deal. There are some arresting facts, of particular embarrassment to Delors in his current travails.

First, a self-styled `Clinton aide' from a US law firm, called Akin Gump, had a meeting about one month ago with Andreas van Agt, the former Dutch prime minister and EEC ambassador to the Unit- ed States. He urged the Commission not to strike a deal with the Bush administration, at least not before the election. Second, Pascal Lamy spent several days before the election with the Clinton camp. Asked about this, M. Delors' office claimed the hatchet-man was merely `running in the New York marathon'.

Third, Delors sent the wannest, not to say most cringe-making, telegram of con- gratulations to Mr Clinton yet seen; the two men share a preference for managed trade, if not protectionism.

Well, perhaps the Irish are going too far. Perhaps it doesn't add up to a plot, more a striking and unhealthy coincidence of inter- est.

But Delors will be moderately lucky to survive the current fiasco. In the end, he and France will be outvoted. In the end, the rape-seed subsidies will come to be seen as the opiate that kept the patient alive by dulling the pain. Common sense would insist that a deal is there to be done, perhaps imminently. For the first time, Europe's agriculture would come under Gatt world trading rules. The only question is, would the EEC, and the French, observe them?

Boris Johnson is the Daily Telegraph's EEC correspondent.

Mind your English

WELL, I'LL be hanged! All you need to do to get a hundred readers jumping on you is to use the word hung instead of hanged when referring to execution. They write in to point out that game is hung and villains hanged. Professor Donald Cameron Watt of the London School of Economics, in a Sunday Telegraph book review, recently referred to Ribbentrop's being hung. A brave man.

Fowler's Modern English Usage distin- guishes simply between hanged for exe- cution and hung for all else. But the question is not so simple. The Oxford English Dictionary takes a reasonable course: in the sense of capital punish- ment 'hanged is now the specific form of the past tense and the past participle; though hung is used by some, especially in the south of England'. The London School of Economics is in the south of England, so that lets Professor Cameron Watt off the hook.

More interestingly, perhaps, what some might regard as a modern Ameri- can vulgarism has a venerable history. Well-hung, meaning 'endowed with large sexual organs', dates from the 17th cen- tury, though the OED regards it as obsolete. James Howell in his quaintly named but once popular Epistolae Ho- Elianae, dating from about 1645, writes: `They cut off his genitories, (and they say he was hung like an ass).'

Dot Wordsworth