Should our infants pay French farmers £12 a week?

Europe has become a deeply unpopular issue in British politics.   The Conservatives do not mention it because the leadership thinks that the subject makes the party look old fashioned.  The Lib Dems do not mention it because their seats in the South West are largely eurosceptic.  They know that the Lib Dem policy on the European Union is not popular with the voters.  The Blair Government does not mention it, because they have totally failed to protect British interests.

The latest figures on the Common Agricultural Policy show how little British interests count.  France and Britain have very similar populations of around 60 million.  France gets ten billion euros under the C.A.P.   Britain receives 4.35 billion euros.  British taxpayers subsidise French farmers.  The Government have wholly failed to claw back Britain’s contribution to French agriculture.  Yet this has not been made the subject of a great national debate.  The C.A.P. is shrugged off as an abuse – a French racket – one can do nothing about.

I always hesitate to do calculations on the back of an envelope in case I get the maths wrong.  By my calculations, everyone in Britain, including infants and old age pensioners, is paying a subsidy of £12 a week to the French farmers.  I would prefer to have my weekly £12 go to the British farmers.  Is there anyone who defends the transfer payment from British to French farmers?  Except, of course, the French.

Comments

[Chris Sherwood]

I don't know how you did your calculation; I get £1.80 a week, but that is by the by.

Calculating the cost of EU membership to Britons is a very complicated undertaking, and must include caluclation of the receipts as well as the payments. Furthermore, the money that goes to the EU budget doesn't become part of a zero-sum game; the whole point of having the budget centrally rather than doing country-to-country transfers is that we are not simply in the business of subsidising each other, but that the EU provides added value beyond the dollar (or ECU) amounts that are transferred.

The CAP takes up some 40% of the EU budget, which itself is 1% of countries' GDP. The CAP certainly costs us financially, but it needs to be put in a much broader context. What do we get for the CAP? We get security of supply of food, and stable food prices, to name two benefits. For a country that is more vulnerable to insecurity and volatility than most, the UK actually does benefit from the CAP in that sense.

Then you can get even deeper into the economic effects by looking at what effect the CAP has on world food prices, and this differs from product to product.

Is it worth a £5.65 billion subsidy? That is rather a subjective judgement. I do think that the Government might have been much more single-minded about linking rebate reform to CAP reform, as the French have been in their defence of CAP. But this should not obscure the very siginifcant reform of CAP that has already been achieved.

Moreover, I have not heard many voices arguing for the CAP to be entirely scrapped, leaving farmers around Europe at the mercy of market forces. The debate is really about what kind of CAP we want for our £1.80 a week - a debate that we should not shy away from, and which we have perhaps indeed left too much to the Government and NFU to deal with.

[Lord Truth]

You are of course right..and it is shocking..and monstrous and it does make me want to bang my head against a wall...and yet..ultimately -there is no need for Europe to grow food at all..the USA grain SURPLUS alone is greater than Frances total grain production etcetc..Britains farms could certainly be turned into golf courses...Do we want this dependency? The only way to sustain agriculture in Europe is through various subsidies and for various reasons France gets the most.
In a sense of course there is another factor...
Millions of people ,British especially, love sitting at tables in French villages drinking a glass of wine ,watching the tractors coming home,the children playing,"What paradise "they say, "A simple life of hard satisfying toil-when I retire Im going to come and live here"
Well, keeping that way of life going costs money."Who cares" you say,let it collapse...But remember ,you could build a very nice housing estate on Stonehenge...

[Chris Gillibrand]

Amazingly, as a group Lib Dem voters are much more Eurosceptic when compared with Conservative and Socialist voters. One assumes that UKIP voters take top place for Euroscepticism. If Lib Dems ever entered government, their vote would melt away in the south-west, as it is mostly a protest, indeed non-conformist, vote.

[jon livesey]

I'd prefer to see that money go to neither the French nor British farmers. Instead, I'd like us to recognize that we are actually paying foreign aid to countries like France, which should cause us to consider where that aid might have better been spent. Just suppose we had taken Britain's net EU contribution since 1970 and had spent it in the third world instead. How many people could we have saved from starvation, how many from blindness or from other preventable diseases? How many third world countries could we have raised out of grinding poverty? Was it really so wise to spend that money on any European farmers? For what? So that they could buy themselves Mercedes?

[Sean]

I fear your envelope has let you down again as my calculations suggest it's £1.20 per week per person, with your answer out by a factor of 10.

On the other hand I agree with the thrust of your argument. £3.9 billion per year is a lot of anyone's money to be wasting. I think the EU fisheries policy is even less defensible, although thankfully on a smaller scale than the CAP.

The question for me is whether there is any way short of leaving the EU to reform the policies or recover the powers. I am instinctively supportive of the idea of the EU but increasingly coming to believe that we have to leave it because of the centralist, protectionist, bureaucratic, and statist nature of so many of its policies.

[HJHJ]

I agree with your point, but I think your maths is mistaken.

10 billion Euros for French farmers works about at about £10 per month per person in the UK. If you look at the net transfer to French farmers (i.e subtracting the subsidy to our farmers) the figure is clearly only just over half this amount.

Of course, the CAP also costs us indirectly in higher food prices.

[Joe Public]

Well, the 12 pounds a week is just a part of a package, is not it. It buys us an access to a huge EU market and the the Frenchs may argue that the Brits get more money than them in other subsidies from Brussels. And some British customers do mind to go shopping for French CAP products to Calaise in their thousands - to get their 12 pounds a week back. Joe.

[David Vinter]

Lord Rees Mogg is right, but maybe he like I, was misled by Edward Heath into signing away our sovereignty on the pretence that the EEC was to be a trading area.Had I known what was coming, the UK would be independent.
DWV.

[Sheila Lemstra]

I have lived in France for 17 years & work closely with French agricultural workers, mostly "viticulteurs".
I was delighted by Rees-mogg's blog because I can testify to the appalling abuse which takes place of the subsidies handed out by the French govt for uprooting & replanting vinyards & redeployment of agricultural land.
These people are remarkably cynical aboutit themselves but the "generation Mitterand" know nothing else, a bit like the eastern block before the end of communism - some reeducation is required...

[c king]

Successive governments have seen this absurd situation as the price we have to pay for very late entry into the system. That was probably true a couple of decades ago but do we still need to featherbed the French? And the Spanish? Time we resolved this matter once and for all even if it does ruffle some feathers. They are only too good at looking after their own narrow interests. By contrast, we are terrible.

[Gervas Douglas]

Unfortunately you have put your finger on the real problem - the lack of competence, honesty and any moral courage among the leaderships of Britain's main political parties.

[S.J.Jarmuz]

To add insult to injury, £2 of the £12 were added by our Priminister only last year! With friends like this who needs enemies?

[Maggie]

This is a subject that makes my blood boil !
Of course our infants should not pay the French farmers anything. !
I am living in close proximity to one such farmer & witness first hand their wasteful /slap happy/lazy/dirty methods.
Then there is their long lunches after which they turn up & keep the whole nieghbourhood awake by arriving at, 11pm working until 1 am, to harvest the corn, [ that damn reversing beep is twice as loud at night ]This farmer has huge new tractors & attachments, it's not uncommon for him to leave the engine running for 30 minutes whilst he 'pops ' into my neighbours for a beer. God only knows how much he gets handed by the EU, & this is a small time farmer, by English standards.
He also runs about 3/4 cars.
They laugh at us, for our stupidity & generosity !!!

[libertyscott]

While agriculture is peripheral to the GDP of Europe, the efficient producers in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina get punished while Europe produces food expensively, subsidised and dumps it on foreign markets.

What doesn't help is the vapid argument about food miles. A study by Lincoln University in New Zealand has demonstrated that the total energy use for producing milk in the UK is 2 times that of New Zealand, even taking into account the energy to transport it halfway around the world. For Apples NZ uses 40% less energy than the UK, and for lamb one-quarter.

The economic arguments are bankrupt, the environmental arguments are bankrupt, and it is about time that people who want to prop up European farmers pay the price at the supermarket for "premium UK lamb", and then much of the land fertilised and pesticised in Europe might revert to being natural once more. This will reward the world's economic and environmentally sensitive food producers, and leave some European farmers to specialise on high quality top end products for those prepared to pay.

[Peter Bolt]

Never lose sight of the salient fact that from the very beginning and with considerable forward planning the EU was intended to enrich France at the expense of the rest of Europe. This was considered essential to restore French pride after 1945. Left as such it would have eventually "died a death". Along came "Smiling Ted Heath" voila.Once De Gaulle realised just how vainglorious was the British PM the trap was set.

[Victor Cowen]

Whatever the numbers.The only way is OUT. But who is going to lead us out - Moses ?
Qué lio as we say in Spanish - 'what a mess'

[Chris Sherwood]

I'm not sure Lord Truth is right about the EU not needingto grow grain because of US surpluses. This year the world wheat market has been under enormous pressure because of bad harvests in the US, Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and Australia. As a result wheat and other grain prices have shot up. There is much to be said for self-sufficiency in food production despite the logic of globalisation and world trade.

In the case of the wheat market this year, it will obviously be poorer countries that suffer most, as the price of bread is much higher relative to people's income. Increasing production worldwide is not just a benefit to the growers; it benefits poorer countries disproportionately because of the price swings. This kind of thing should not be lost in the background noise of the obvious need for radical CAP reform.

[Ted Maul]

I'm not sure I understand the maths here.

45.5% of the 2006 EU budget is devoted to the CAP, 22% of which goes to France. This means that 10.01% of the EU budget goes to French agriculturalists.

Britains gross contribution (after rebate) to the EU is £9,486m in 2006. 10.01% of this equals £949.5m.

£949.5m divided by 60m (the UK's total population) equals £15.83. This is Britain's annual per capita payment to French farmers.

Divide £15.83 by 52, and you arrive at a weekly figure of 30 pence.

Hmm. I hope I haven't muddled pounds up with euros along the way! In any case, this fiscal figure takes no account of the elevated cost which (in theory, notwithstanding supermarket price wars and supplier-squeezing) consumers pay in shops for subsidised, tariff-protected food.

Raw figures from the Treasury's most recent annual statement on the EU budget.
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/664/24/ecbudget250506.pdf

[john gregory Flinn]

Pardon my pedantry, and I might be wrong, but from what Lord R-M says both France and the UK RECEIVE money for the CAP from the EU!
France receives 5.65 billion Euros more than the UK which works out at 1.81 euros per week, or £1.21.
This does'nt help Lord R-M's argument at all because the UK may receive other subsidies and or payments which reduce the difference,(does'nt Mrs T's refund figure in here?).

So, this argument is really about who should get more, or less out of the EU.
Our infants are not paying the French more - the EU collectively might be. But the EU did this for Ireland, Spain, Portugal and now the A8 countries....

For want of a better name its called 're-distribution of wealth' and very socialist!