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European Community
Threatened
With Collapse?
E
UROPE
is economically
at the crossroads.
The European Econom–
ic Community's agricul–
tura! policy has threatened to
destroy 25 years of arduous
work toward the unification of
Europe.
To update readers of
The Plain
Truth,
senior writet John Ross
Schroeder interviewed Martín Va–
sey, spokesman for the Commis–
sioner of Agriculture for the EEC,
in Brussels, Belgium.
In brief, what is the European
Community' s Common Agricultura!
Policy?
We have a common agricultura!
policy because we are a common
market. That is to say, we have
decided "to abolish all obstacles to
trade between member states. But
you can't just remove the obstacles
to cross-frontier trade. Otherwise
the result would be chaos. You
have to replace your existi ng
national agricultura! policies by a
common policy.
This process is not
100
percent
complete in the sense that you can
still leave a considerable margin
for member states. For example,
we still leave health regulations
very largely to member states a nd
that creates a lot of problems for
intercommunity trade. We still
leave member states very largely
free to spend money on improving
infrastructure, encouraging tech–
nical training and modernization
of farms, though we are trying to
September 1984
strengthen the Community frame–
work for that.
The part of the agricultura! pol–
icy that we really have made Com–
munity [responsibi lity] is market
support- the system of guaranteed
prices and the means by which you
support these guaranteed prices.
When people talk about the
Common Agricultura! Policy what
they normally mean is the system
of market support that takes up 95
percent of all Community expendi–
ture on agriculture and about 60
percent of all Community expendi–
ture.
Since the Community is, after
al!, essent ially an industrial com–
munity, agriculture being 5 per–
cent of GNP overall, there is a
very great iinbalance between the
amount of resources we devote to
agriculture ánd the amount of
resources we devote to the indus–
trial sector, such as steel, textiles
and also the new technological sec–
tors of industry. You can under–
stand from that analysis why the
debate over the future of agricul–
tura! policy is so immensely impor–
tant for the future of the Commu–
nity.
The European editor of a major
international news weekly said the
followíng about the Community' s
agricultura! policy: " Even the stub·
bornly optimistic French admit
that the .. . scheme ... encour–
ages waste and sloth, and pro–
duces little more than unsalable
mounts of butter and surplus
dunes of powdered milk. " Would
you agree wíth that statement?
No, l would not agree with that
statement, and 1 would be very
interested to find out which
Frenchman agrees with it as well.
The general view is that it has
been immensely successful in
encou raging the development of
European agriculture- which
20
years ago was still very largely
based on small peasant type
farms- into a modern intensive
form of agriculture.
In many sectors the Community
has yields exceeding those in the
U.S. The cost has certainly risen
beyond what the member states
consider reasonable, largely be–
cause of the growing surpluses in
certain sectors, but these are the
problems of success, not of failure.
And these problems are also being
met with on the other side of the
Atlantic.
There are two kinds of agricul–
tura! policies in the world. You've
got, on the one hand, the European
Community and North America,
which are having to deal with the
problems of success and how to
control the tendency of production
to outrun the available markets.
And, on the other hand, you have
the socialist countries in Eastern
Europe and a large part of the
Third World, which are increas–
ingly unable to feed their popula–
tions.
It woufd of course be nice to
have an agricultura) policy that
was perfectly balanced, but if
you've got to have a policy that
does not achieve equilibrium it is
better to have to deal with the
problems of surpluses than it is to
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