Wheat or tweet?
The European Union is going to get rid of one of its oddest rules, whereby farmers are ordered not to grow anything on part of their land and then paid for not doing their job.
Instead of scrapping it, perhaps the European Union should be thinking of expanding the idea?
Journalists could be paid by the "not word" for not turning in tedious articles, and whole pages could be left blank. In an effort to tackle climate change, car manufacturers could be paid for letting assembly lines run idle as workers watch not cars trundle off them. Politicians, perhaps, could reward their loyal foot soldiers with pints and pub lunches for not canvassing in not-to-be-held general elections.
Be that as it may, is to be set aside. It's a penny to a euro that it will never come back. It was an answer to over-production. Since the foundation of the EU, farmers were paid to produce, even if nobody bought their goods. Hence those butter and grain mountains and wine lakes.
So, about 15 years ago someone had the bright idea of paying them not to produce on 10% of their land. But there are no grain mountains now. A bad harvest in Australia and southern Europe, and an export ban in Ukraine have meant less grain on the market and so higher prices.
So today will be asked The whole idea will be reviewed in November and the is keen to get rid of set-aside altogether.
Not everyone is happy. One side-effect of set-aside is that it can safeguard wildlife, particularly if it's land that is never cultivated, rather than rotated year by year. The says it could be a disaster. The French has particularly benefited from the policy.
And you thought that was the in general.
I’m Mark Mardell, the 91Èȱ¬'s North America editor. These are my reflections on American politics, some thoughts on being a Brit living in the USA, and who knows what else? My 
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This is bad news. It means that I will have to cultivate every square centimetre of my garden. I wonder what policy initiative the little bustards will come up with next.
If you are suggesting that the EU should pay people not to work, you are too late. That's already the policy. Look at the jobs for life, the long paid vacations, sick leave, maternity leave, disability benefits and of course the ultimate goal of any worker, unemployment benefits at full salary for life if he can't get another job. And if you have any doubts that the EU is paid not to work look at the EU Parliament itself, a model of self indulgent junkets, expense accounts, and countless perks all at taxpayer cost. Is it any wonder why the EU is the world's worst place to invest in a business?
While Mardell's wit concerning set-aside policies might humor some, he ignores perhaps the most important reason 'odd' set-aside policies have existed in both Europe and the USA -- fallow ground naturally replenishes essential nitrogen in the soil. Time and time again, in country after country, it is proven that excessively intense farming of any soil will inevitably destroy its long-term potential. The set-aside policy is far from odd -- it is essential.
Although ironically intended, your suggestion to expand the payment of people to do nothing is not such a bad idea at all.
The 1964 91Èȱ¬ Reith lecture (Leon Bagrit) claimed that a universally aristocratic society based on machine slave labour and not human labour could be possible -if only people were educated properly to integrate the "two cultures" described by C.P. Snow.
So what happened? How (and why) did our education system get destroyed (increasing the gap between disciplines and specializations) -and why has the end of the cold war shown us more the "ugly face of Capitalism" than anything else?
We have had the Marxist/Stalinist/Maoist "workers revolution" and we have had the Reagan/Thatcher/Bush/Blair "bourgeois revolution" -both have failed to bring wealth and happiness to the world. Perhaps it is indeed time for Bagrit's "aristocratic revolution".......
It is my personal memory that the 60's and 70's did indeed (in some countries) bring about a period of great (mass) creativity, innovation and social involvement -funded largely by the riches of a welfare state and the post war "wirtshaft wunder" based on socialist redistribution of wealth within a Kensian economics system.
However, it seems that in the 1980's such a social system was deliberately destroyed for (reactionary) political reasons.
Then too, many (international) loans were failing, presumably because of a number of failed "modernization" programme laid down by the "international community in "developing countries" -at a time when "automatisation" projects needed to be funded in the more developed "donor" countries. As a result, the natural difficulties of determining how the system of redistribution of wealth should function, instead of being part of a healthy socio-political debate, were exploited by the media and the political system to cut back on the whole system. Clearly, this debate is still going on in France today....
In the soviet union, people were kept quiet by having to stand in the queue to get basic essential foodstuffs, etc. -but in the west (and the rest of the world) the public is kept quiet by having to iether exist at a subsistance level (so they will gladly work cheaply for the rich) or preserve the system by getting (commercial) jobs earning enough money to buy the consumer goods that they were persuaded to believe were essential to their (social) survival.
So the current, bland, uncreative age of consumerism and feudal wage slaves became a global way of life -destroying all other cultures in its path. In the meantime, it is questionable if our commercialised (job based) education system is capable of producing the radical thinkers that are required to solve the problems caused by such a soul-destroying and mind-numbing system as we now have.
Most of our early scientific and cultural thinkers were rich aristocrats who were amateurs and genuinly interested in their "philosophical" inventions which they could persue because they did not need to work. Perhaps, this could be the way forward again. However, in a more democratic way -based on payments for not working for others......
I wish MEPs could be paid for not assembling and given bonuses for not passing any legislation.
Imagine amount of money saved!
Like most British commentators on EU affairs, Mark Mardell cannot resist the temptation to sneer at the apparent absurdities of the Common Agricultural Policy. Fair enough; much of the policy can seem bizarre to those not familiar with the many paradoxes of agricultural economics. But the 'set aside' programme is not an example of weird policy dreamed up by Brussels bureaucrats. It was borrowed from the Americans.
This seems to encapsulate the whole argument against the EU - that the main beneficiaries are always the little French Bustards.
Shame on you for regurgitating those old chestnuts about set-aside, ha ha ha I wish I could be paid for not doing something etc etc. Set aside was an eminently sensible policy at the time. The economics of farming are that it is worth planting a field rather then leaving it idle even if grain prices are rock bottom. This leads to overproduction (not helped by production subsidies admittedly) and a vicious circle of declining prices and rural poverty. It's one of the things which makes agriculture different from any other industry and treated as such almost everywhere in the world (and the US is a prime example, for those who think the US is a beacon of free enterprise).
This overproduction was not going to be tackled without some intervention, and set-aside made sense. Of course there are policing issues but that doesn't detract from the case.
The situation is now different with prices soaring. Scrapping set-aside can relieve the issue although I am concerned that the bio-fuel reason for prices rising may be a problem in itself. I have real trouble beieving it's the solution to the world's energy problems.
The CAP has many faults but many aspects and individual decisions are very sensible and made by intelligent people. It's perhaps a prime case of a series of individually sensible and logical steps leading to an expensive and maybe absurd outcome. Just saying it's all nonsense is too easy and I'm sorry this normally excellent blog has sunk to that (in the last line).
I am not a farmer nor involved in the CAP nor related to anyone who is.
Very interesting article. Where else, but in subsidy-laden, sloth-encouraging, EU can one expect to have rules to pay people for being less productive ? Should one expect "sloth lobbyists" in Brussels asking for per acre sloth-subsidy to be hiked to counter the effect of the reduction of the zero grain area ?
Farmers haven't waited for the CAP to let some of their land lie fallow. The've done crop rotation since the middle ages and that meant leaving a portion fallow. Besides the bad harvests in parts of the world,the recent bio-fuel mania has diverted part of the food crops towards fuel making. Seems to me the Commission is reacting in an economically rational way: if demand increases, increase the supply
Hello
All earthlings are running out of space and resources.
We shall all have to muddle on together and let nature take its course - whether it is CO2 or other people that we battle with. We are part of nature and will be taking our chances along with all the other animals.
What I would like to know, is how the European Commission knows how much they are spending on set aside.
The reason being, that no organisation has ever authorised the annual European Union financial budget.
So there financial decisions are all based on guess work - unless someone knows different.
As you suggest, set-aside is (and always was) a silly idea. Surpluses were caused by wasteful market intervention and paying farmers 'not to grow' was just as barmy (though profitable for a few). Set-aside's temporariness and management limitations limit severely any wildlife benefit. Longer lasting schemes encouraging management specifically for environmental and social purposes (e.g. Stewardship) are a much more sensible and efficient use of public resources.
A typically anti-countryside piece from Mr Metropolitan.
Which industry provides food for our children, keeps our continent from turning into a rather large forest and keeps the old ways going? Discuss.
Of course, the politicians (and their hangers-on such as Mr Mardell) don't care - the countryside is sparsely populated, so there aren't many votes there; natural justice doesn't come into it.
Huw Roberts; a farmer's son.
As you suggest, set-aside is (and always was) a silly idea. Surpluses were caused by wasteful market intervention and paying farmers 'not to grow' was just as barmy (though profitable for a few). Set-aside's temporariness and management limitations limit severely any wildlife benefit. Longer lasting schemes encouraging management specifically for environmental and social purposes (e.g. Stewardship) are a much more sensible and efficient use of public resources.
If you think this policy is "strange", you're clearly missing some of the basic principles of agriculture. Intensive cultivation of the land leads to eventual spoilage of said land. Might be worth a listen at your kids' history lessons (in French? God forbid!) about the Middle Ages...
"All earthlings are running out of space and resources.
We shall all have to muddle on together and let nature take its course - whether it is CO2 or other people that we battle with." [#11]
The bad news is that China's and India's population is rapidly increasing. The good one is that EU's population is shrinking.
Although I'm not sure that thinking EU citizens would consider such a balancing act a happy event.
Some posts here are suggesting that the Chinese model of factory working is more desirable than the EU one .... err .... i dont think so! We should all strive to have contracts like the EU Parliament, not snipe at it!
PS: Mark mardell wrote "Journalists could be paid by the "not word" for not turning in tedious articles, and whole pages could be left blank."
Present company excepted of course -but perhaps this would be preferable to much of the non-news garbage produced by many (especially) British and American tabloid and TV journalists -particularly those covering "politics", "technology" and "lifestyle" without apparently being able to distinguish between them.
Didn't the mass communication media persuade many people that the invasion of Iraq would be a guarenteed walk-in-the-park success which would bring peace and democracy (and capitalism) to the world -after removing the WMD's which were apparently never there? So, is this journalism -or a commercial form of paying people to not do their work (properly)?
Most people who signal malpractice (in business or government) seem to be punished more than the perpatrators. Apparently, we have already developed a hypocritical culture that is based on paying people to not do their work properly.
America, Australia, Canada and many other countries pay Philippine doctors more if they don't work here as doctors but instead work in the above mentioned countries as nurses. So the poor Philippines are subsidising the rich countries -enabling them to pay their own workers not to think and not do (expensive) intelligent work iether.
What about the physical "setting aside" of consumer goods which still work -simply because a more modern, fashionable, version is on the market?
Perhaps there are socially useful forms of "set-aside" as well as socially damaging ones. Maybe we should all work harder at finding out what is really going on.....
Its a bad idea. Some farmers may continue to do it anyway - they make money in the winter from game shoots in the set aside land. Not as much as they may make from crops but the additional benefit in flora/fauna diversity was in my opinion well worth it. I also echo the comments about crop rotation being essential for replenishing the natural environment - if crop rotation stops, we'll have to use fertilisers and chemicals even more than we do now. Its not 'money for nothing', its just money for *farmers* to do nothing. The rest of us benefitted in ways that are difficult to quantify, but nevertheless are present.
hmmm..."set-aside" for farms sounds a bit like "family planning" (or one child policy) in countries like China and India. And yes, some time back, increasing population in these countries (with the economic policies contributing) made things worse - more people, more often than not, meant more _poor_ people. If one now draws a parallel between "human production" and farm production, indeed more grain could mean lower value for the grain. However, this is a matter of perspective. There is a "zero sum game" perspective, based on the foundation of limited resources and limited value. More people would then mean more people competing for the same set of resources, eventually, compromising / yielding to market forces, and then the value goes down. But then, there is a strong alternative perspective - as India and China are now discovering. More people can mean more value - the exact opposite of the zero-sum-game. Provided the right conditions are created, more people implies more productivity and finally more value. This is a positive feedback cycle, where the size of the value cake continuously grows.
Coming back to why "set-aside" is wrong, apart from the rather obvious uses of "extra grain" (ex., charity), there can be a number of other positive feedback cycles that can propel the economy much further. Set-aside, in that sense, reflects the rather conservative, zero-sum-game mindset of the eurocrat. Bio-fuel is but one example of what we could do with more grain. Who knows, set-aside could have been preventing a number of other goodies from happening - there could be something to be gained in terms of restoring environmental balance, or rural unemployment, or health etc...but then the wise-old eurocrats decided with a stroke of the pen to limit human endeavor - all because of their unfortunate conviction that human endeavor creates no new fruits in itself - that it merely redistributes the limited fruits that nature has to offer.
C'mon guys, set-aside simply means reduce the speed of progress by 10%...the thoughts behind such ideologies belong to the graveyard of communism. Brussels, wake up.
There are some confusing and contradictory ideas on economics here.
Doug says:
"It is proven that excessibly intensive farming of any soil will inevitably destroy its long-term potential. The set-aside policy is far from odd -- it is essential."
Fair enough. But I don't understand how it follows that we should be paying farmers to do something which is in their self-interest to do anyway?
Ben says:
"The economics of farming are that it is worth planting a field rather than leaving it idle even if grain prices are rock bottom. This leads to overproduction ... and a vicious circle of declining prices and rural poverty."
The first part of this contradicts the historical evidence, a la Doug, that crop rotation and leaving ground fallow is better. But regardless of that, Ben seems to be advocating that the laws of supply and demand shpould be suspended for agricultural produce. Declining prices haven't hurt us in manufacturing industries. What's different about farming?
Set-aside made sense on a temporary basis when it was introduced, but, with demand for bio-fuel set to rise to cut down on use of fossil fuels,and the need for extensive tree planting to absorb carbon, the days of paying farmers to leave land fallow are surely numbered.
Just where do the environmental lobby think we will get our fuel from, or do they think we are going to return to mud huts?
British comments on the Common Agricultural Policy are always bordering on the surreal, especially when they aim at bashing the French.
While the French farmers supply us with high quality food and maintain a beautiful landscape, the UK agricultural industry has brought us mainly food scares. Moreover, the landed gentry happily cashes in on EU subventions as Tony Blair vetoed a capping of payments.
Maybe Mark can find out how much the useless royals in the UK receive from the set-aside scheme?
hmmm..."set-aside" for farms sounds a bit like "family planning" (or one child policy) in countries like China and India. And yes, some time back, increasing population in these countries (with the economic policies contributing) made things worse - more people, more often than not, meant more _poor_ people. If one now draws a parallel between "human production" and farm production, indeed more grain could mean lower value for the grain. However, this is a matter of perspective. There is a "zero sum game" perspective, based on the foundation of limited resources and limited value. More people would then mean more people competing for the same set of resources, eventually, compromising / yielding to market forces, and then the value goes down. But then, there is a strong alternative perspective - as India and China are now discovering. More people can mean more value - the exact opposite of the zero-sum-game. Provided the right conditions are created, more people implies more productivity and finally more value. This is a positive feedback cycle, where the size of the value cake continuously grows.
Coming back to why "set-aside" is wrong, apart from the rather obvious uses of "extra grain" (ex., charity), there can be a number of other positive feedback cycles that can propel the economy much further. Set-aside, in that sense, reflects the rather conservative, zero-sum-game mindset of the eurocrat. Bio-fuel is but one example of what we could do with more grain. Who knows, set-aside could have been preventing a number of other goodies from happening - there could be something to be gained in terms of restoring environmental balance, or rural unemployment, or health etc...but then the wise-old eurocrats decided with a stroke of the pen to limit human endeavor - all because of their unfortunate conviction that human endeavor creates no new fruits in itself - that it merely redistributes the limited fruits that nature has to offer.
C'mon guys, set-aside simply means reduce the speed of progress by 10%...the thoughts behind such ideologies belong to the graveyard of communism. Brussels, wake up.
How ironic. When there's overproduction (mountains of butter and lakes of wine), the EU is a crazy, undemocratic bureaucracy. When the EU tackles overproduction through a set-aside policy, the EU is a crazy, undemocratic bureaucracy. When there are production shortages and the EU moves to alleviate the problem by abolishing the set-aside policy, the EU is a crazy, undemocratic bureaucracy again. Shall we conclude that some people will criticize the EU no matter what it does or doesn't do?
From an economic perspective, agriculture is a somewhat strange beast. Its chief resource is arable land whose area is more or less fixed and can't track economic developments. For a landowner, it's almost always more profitable in the short term to grow something, anything, even when there's overproduction.
The set-aside policy is a sensible way to provide much-needed flexibility by artificially decreasing or increasing the arable land area in response to changing economic situation.
Set-Aside was never a good idea: it was the bureaucratic answer to a problem created by bureaucrats: farming subsidies. Good Riddance!
Now we just have to work on removing subsidies -- the cause of the problem in the first place.
Talking about paying people not to work, during the 70's and the 3 day week didn't productivity per worker actually rise?
This just goes to show how difficult policy making can be at times. As always a compromise needs to be found between competing demands. In this case there is the rising demand for agricultural products, fuelled in part by an ill-conceived craze for bio-fuels, the need for sustainable managment of agricultural lands, the need for sufficient income for farmers and the increasing ecological awareness (making that part of the electorate also cares about the French bustard). Again this blog becomes a forum for so much blatant distrust in the Community institutions - and thus also in the various Member State governments, who still control the Council, as some seem so easily forget - that the Community seems damned if they do and damned if they don't. Like any policy maker the EC at times gets it right and at times get it wrong - but nothing suggests that they're particularly worse than any other authority. Actually, the EC has the advantage that it is open to the most diverse interest groups and opinions and usually comes out with something that tries to meet as much common ground as possible.
By the way, to alleviate Donald's concern in post 11, this also applies to the budget. That is no more guess work than any other budget. It is actually subject to very serious long term constraints agreed upo by the Member States. The annual budget is moreover the object of a complicated decision making procedure involving the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament (which gets the final say). It is actually the President of the directly elected European Parliament which signs the budget into law. Moreover, like in the Member States the EU budget is subject to both political control and external checks. Moreover, the EU has even its own Court of Auditors to report on possible abuses of EU funds.
It's truly miserable - really, profoundly depressing - that after so long in the EU, it's still not possible to mention the E-word without stirring up the herd of mouth-frothing UKIP drones who hang around the interactive bits of the 91Èȱ¬ website.
Set-aside was an unusual and counter-intuitive response to the realities of economic agriculture in the 80's and 90's. It's a good thing it's being phased out, because more people will make more wealth as market conditions change.
But the biodiversity costs will be large when set-aside finishes, and this needs to be met by legislation that specifically addresses the problem, not by tweaking an economic support measure to conservation ends - like using a spanner to hammer in nails, it's OK in a pinch but you want the proper tool.
That means being in Europe, and engaging with other European populations to get the laws we need.
every industrie has to manage it's production capacity in order to balance the varying demand and supply as optimally as possible, and utilizing that capacity 100 percent all the time is economic utopia. The automotive industrie has huge unused capacity right now, so did the steel industry years ago. If the car industry has to make choice between leaving some of the capacity unused or havind stockpiles of finished cars that they cannot get rid of, they'll obviously chose for the former. It's no different with agriculture. So what the EU is doing now makes sense. What's wrong are the mechanisms to regulate the capacity through massive subsidizing in the EU, the US and Japan, thereby ignoring our own free trade principles and subsidizing exports to get rid of the subsidized production surplusses. To the extent that a lot of that below-cost food is going to developing countries, it kills the local agriculture and economy, close to immoral I'd say.
Market forces let loose in food production ? Scary ! Of course, this is the way forward, to prevent dumping of goods on developing countries which don't have such lavish budgets.
But I can't help thinking this is the beginning of the end of quality French produce, and hello to American style mega-farm agribusiness. And they will probably still manage to damage farms in the third world via the World Trade Organisation.
As for your remarks about journalists producing less - have a look at the book 'How to be Free' by Tom Hodgkinson - I guarantee that his manifesto for 'doing less' will seem radical now, but be 'received wisdom' in a generation's time.
p.s. On a personal note, would you be willing to do a 'From Our Own Correspondent' Feature on how CAP reform will affect the Mark Mardell diet ?
I think it's a good idea that
EU is going to get rid of CAP.
EU spends between 80% and 85% of it's budget and there are some problems linked to this policy:
1)the agricultural subsides are payed to the owners of the lands regardless the owners are farmer or not. For example CAP pay money directly to the Qeen.
2)The money are distributed disproportionately
3)CAP is form of dumping that is prohibited by WTO.
"I can't help thinking this is the beginning of the end of quality French produce, and hello to American style mega-farm agribusiness." [#21]
Let's hope that it is the end of the monopoly of overpriced bananas(although not the straight ones yet) from former French colonies and hello to much cheaper bananas from the Carribean nations; good bye to overpriced and often inferior French wines and hello to cheaper and often better American, Australian, Chilean,
and South African ones.
I don't think that overcharged EU customers would complain much.
Stewart Robertson (in reply #21):
" There are some confusing and contradictory ideas on economics here.
Doug says:
"It is proven that excessibly intensive farming of any soil will inevitably destroy its long-term potential. The set-aside policy is far from odd -- it is essential."
Fair enough. But I don't understand how it follows that we should be paying farmers to do something which is in their self-interest to do anyway?
Ben says:
"The economics of farming are that it is worth planting a field rather than leaving it idle even if grain prices are rock bottom. This leads to overproduction ... and a vicious circle of declining prices and rural poverty."
The first part of this contradicts the historical evidence, a la Doug, that crop rotation and leaving ground fallow is better.
Nope, I think that your view of economics - or is it life in general - are rather naïve. It's probably not in the interest of the farmer to care about what the land he's cultivating will become in 10 years. Merely because 10 years from now he might not be a farmer any more, he might keep a bank instead. Or any other business, started with the profits he's made from industrial-sized crops. But the impoverished soil resulting from his business will indeed lead to bad crops, declining prices and rural poverty.
Paying x for not doing his "job" is a rather simplistic way to express the meaning of the policy. It was meant to favour those who practise a certain style of agriculture - i.e. favour a job over another job. It's the essence of any law or form of government: preserving the long term perspectives by favouring them over the short term interests.
Subsidising research in biotechnologies instead of prostitution is again a political decision.
I'm not defending the CAP - it may be obsolete - just know that it will be replaced by something which may seem just as absurd to you.
"Who Would You Like To Pay To Not Work?" - a rather daring question coming from a subject of Her Majesty. =D Do people lack the sense of irony nowadays or what ?
What Britain needs is to be shown the exit door from this unelected orginastion which its rulers are trying to turn into a country called USE all i can say is dream on.Do you think any member state wants to go all the way answer NO NO NO.only the stupid people like Gordon Brown who is on a self destruct mission cause he knows he is on is way out of office bye bye labour yes to the party which listens and does not back stab its people with lies