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European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s final State of the Union (SoU) address this week was well received by MEPs and stakeholders in farming and the agri food industry.
It is a measure of how low expectations are, and how far agriculture has fallen as a priority in EU policy formation, that a conciliatory paragraph in an hour-long address should be so warmly welcomed.
Nothing is included or indeed left out of keynote speeches like the SoU address by accident.
Her speech opened with reference to elections to the EU Parliament in less than 300 days and many MEPs in the EPP political grouping, to which the Commission president is aligned, are from rural constituencies across the EU.
They will have watched how the Farmers Party in Netherlands swept all before them in elections last year, and will be anxiously watching again at voting in the Dutch General Election in November.
There, former Commission heavyweight Frans Timmermans leads a Green-Labour coalition into a battle that will give a strong indication of the direction of travel for the political tide in a country that is characterised as being amongst the most liberal in Europe, as well as having the most productive agriculture.
Strength and weakness
This time last year, there was huge concern in Brussels about the exposure of the EU to dependency on Russian oil and gas.
An energy crisis was averted by a combination of a nimble response and a measure of good luck with a mild winter across Europe. It is a measure of the success achieved by European agriculture that the same level of urgency or concern was given to food supply.
That was a concern for Africa and the world’s poorest countries, who buy food in the global markets.
While Europeans were worried about having hot water for power showers, they didn’t have to worry about food, because they could afford to outbid poorer countries if European dairy, grain or meat supplies were disrupted.
It is a measure of how low expectations are that a conciliatory paragraph in an hour-long address should be so warmly welcomed
The scare was a reminder, however, of why the common agricultural policy or CAP was set up immediately after World War II.
The president’s speech did highlight that “producing healthy food is the foundation of our agricultural policy and self-sufficiency in food is also important for us”.
Opportunity
Farmers should welcome and prepare to engage fully in the strategic dialogue on the future of agriculture in the EU that the president announced she was setting up.
This can be an opportunity to reset the role of agriculture at the centre of EU policy as a pillar priority.
A previous commissioner for agriculture, Franz Fischler, one of the most reforming commissioners, told the Irish Farmers Journal last year that perhaps the EU had moved too far in prioritising environmental and climate policy over productive agriculture. This has to be the starting point for a resetting of agriculture’s place in the EU.
Farmers cannot approach this from a viewpoint of going back to where we were a few decades ago.
Farmers should welcome and prepare to engage fully in the strategic dialogue on the future of agriculture in the EU that the president announced she was setting up
Future farming and support for farming has to include meaningful commitment to the climate and environment agenda, parallel to productive agriculture. For too long it has been either one or the other; in the future, all have to be given equal priority.
Culling cattle is a simple and effective way of achieving the climate and environmental elements, but it is at the expense of production. Focus on production, as had been the case for the early years of the CAP, has the opposite effect.
The challenge for the next Commission is to not have an 'either or' policy - it has to be both, and farmers have also to be ready to embrace that challenge.
SHARING OPTIONS: