Many currents ran through yesterday's meetings between the Government and leading farmers' organisations, as both sides square up to potentially far-reaching changes in the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy.
The farming leaders say they support a Yes vote in the forthcoming second referendum on the Nice Treaty, but they are linking it to Government support for their positions in the negotiations on CAP reform. The Government says it opposes a radical reform now, only two years after existing policies were put in place. Ministers must nevertheless take account of the wider context in which the European Commission has to operate in proposing change, notably by making it easier to extend the CAP to the new member-states in an enlarged EU and to facilitate negotiation of a new international trade round.
The Commission's much leaked central proposal, to be formally announced next week, would cut the link between farm subsidies and the amount that farmers produce. It would switch resources towards rural development measures making it easier to bring new members into the EU. Payments would be linked to meeting environmental, animal welfare and food quality standards, accompanied by tough audits. They would be capped in such a way as to limit payments to the largest producers. The Government and the farming organisations regard these proposals as a radical reform of the CAP and not the agreed review of the Agenda 2000 scheme adopted at an EU summit in 1999 and due to expire in 2006. The Commission argues that circumstances have changes sufficiently in the meantime to warrant a more radical approach. Consumers have been scared by the outbreaks of BSE and foot and mouth disease. The German government is now more vocally opposed to financing the CAP and loath to see it extended to an enlarged EU.
If it is so extended, the farm commissioner, Mr Fischler argues, the CAP will be much more difficult to change thereafter. He also believes such a radical change now would pre-empt pressure on the CAP in the forthcoming World Trade Organisation negotiations, in which the direct link between subsidies and production, along with associated export subsidies for surplus product, is highly vulnerable to pressure from competing exporters. If the EU were to change its system now it would expose the recent US farm subsidies to attack and deflect pressure on itself. Such considerations have led the Taoiseach to argue forcibly that a second No to Nice would handcuff him and the other Irish negotiators by depriving them of allies in what are bound to be a bruising set of talks. On that basis he spent most of yesterday attempting to convince farming leaders to campaign vigorously for a Yes vote if they want to see their interests protected effectively by the Government.