European chicken race
The canteens that feed the European Commission’s 16 000 employees in Brussels have stopped serving chicken, and the meat served is imported from Argentina, Ireland and New Zealand. Belgian food produce is definitely not flavour of the month.
Over the next six months, a parliamentary commission in Belgium will try to sort out what happened in the dioxin crisis that finished off the last Belgian government, and how to prevent the next crisis. The wrong message has unfortunately already been sent out, when the Belgian government promised to pick up the tab for the poisonous chickens. Letting the market punish the perpetrators would probably have been a better idea.
Is food production at all suited to industrialisation and centralisation? When I was a kid in the Swedish countryside, the closest town held a market every Wednesday, where farmers sold meat and vegetables to the townspeople. That was back in the fifties, but even today, in other parts of Europe, local markets flourish.
Local markets are essential to food quality as well as for effective price control. Big business, often represented not only by the state and the agricultural companies, but also by the farmers’ own organisations, shuns local markets. Or pays lip service to them, but prefers them to be just tourist venues, not real distribution centres.
Picture this: a place where producer and consumer can meet, look each other in the eye, award the good stuff with long queues in front of the stall – and if needs be come to blows over bad products. Is that what it takes, or is this just a nostalgic dream of a society long gone?
With modern information technology, direct contact between producer and consumer could be re-established. Maybe local markets would come back, but on the Web. There have been some promising attempts in this direction, but the middlemen of the agricultural industry are probably going to fight to keep control.
European farmers and related business interests are by far the strongest lobby group in Brussels. Over half of EU payments to the member countries goes to the agricultural sector. Among the recipients France is the clear winner, and the bulk of the money goes to the big players, such as wealthy wheat growers in Picardy in northern France.
The Common Agricultural Policy is perhaps the only common policy of the European Union. But the logic behind support for this overproductive sector, a support provided at huge cost to consumers and taxpayers, is getting increasingly difficult to defend.
For the over-burdened European consumer, two up and coming events offer some hope. One is the world trade talks, where the two main opponents are the US and the EU. In November the foreign ministers of the WTO countries will meet in Seattle.
The United States argues that European Union support to farmers violates free trade principles. Let’s hope the Commissioner for Trade, Mr Pascal Lamy, will lose that argument. The winners would not only be the world's unsubsidised farmers, but every European who is not part of the agricultural complex (i.e. 95 percent of the EU working population).
The other cause for hope is the enlargement of the European Union. With major farming countries like Poland and Hungary knocking on the door, the absurdity of the EU’s agricultural policy becomes obvious. Even though big EU companies are now trying to buy or lease farming land in the soon-to-be new member states, hoping to get their cut of the generous support handed out from Brussels, the rules are likely to be changed before new members are let inside the Union.
In the meantime, watch the beef-labels in your local supermarket. Two weeks ago, a farmer from Flanders in Belgium was arrested for feeding his 500 beef cattle the steroid Stanzolol. The cows have been impounded, but what happens to them later on? A clue: the banned Belgian Coca Cola cans that supposedly were destroyed earlier this year, turned up in supermarkets in Uganda and Lithuania.
Published in Euro Metro, 24 september 1999
Over the next six months, a parliamentary commission in Belgium will try to sort out what happened in the dioxin crisis that finished off the last Belgian government, and how to prevent the next crisis. The wrong message has unfortunately already been sent out, when the Belgian government promised to pick up the tab for the poisonous chickens. Letting the market punish the perpetrators would probably have been a better idea.
Is food production at all suited to industrialisation and centralisation? When I was a kid in the Swedish countryside, the closest town held a market every Wednesday, where farmers sold meat and vegetables to the townspeople. That was back in the fifties, but even today, in other parts of Europe, local markets flourish.
Local markets are essential to food quality as well as for effective price control. Big business, often represented not only by the state and the agricultural companies, but also by the farmers’ own organisations, shuns local markets. Or pays lip service to them, but prefers them to be just tourist venues, not real distribution centres.
Picture this: a place where producer and consumer can meet, look each other in the eye, award the good stuff with long queues in front of the stall – and if needs be come to blows over bad products. Is that what it takes, or is this just a nostalgic dream of a society long gone?
With modern information technology, direct contact between producer and consumer could be re-established. Maybe local markets would come back, but on the Web. There have been some promising attempts in this direction, but the middlemen of the agricultural industry are probably going to fight to keep control.
European farmers and related business interests are by far the strongest lobby group in Brussels. Over half of EU payments to the member countries goes to the agricultural sector. Among the recipients France is the clear winner, and the bulk of the money goes to the big players, such as wealthy wheat growers in Picardy in northern France.
The Common Agricultural Policy is perhaps the only common policy of the European Union. But the logic behind support for this overproductive sector, a support provided at huge cost to consumers and taxpayers, is getting increasingly difficult to defend.
For the over-burdened European consumer, two up and coming events offer some hope. One is the world trade talks, where the two main opponents are the US and the EU. In November the foreign ministers of the WTO countries will meet in Seattle.
The United States argues that European Union support to farmers violates free trade principles. Let’s hope the Commissioner for Trade, Mr Pascal Lamy, will lose that argument. The winners would not only be the world's unsubsidised farmers, but every European who is not part of the agricultural complex (i.e. 95 percent of the EU working population).
The other cause for hope is the enlargement of the European Union. With major farming countries like Poland and Hungary knocking on the door, the absurdity of the EU’s agricultural policy becomes obvious. Even though big EU companies are now trying to buy or lease farming land in the soon-to-be new member states, hoping to get their cut of the generous support handed out from Brussels, the rules are likely to be changed before new members are let inside the Union.
In the meantime, watch the beef-labels in your local supermarket. Two weeks ago, a farmer from Flanders in Belgium was arrested for feeding his 500 beef cattle the steroid Stanzolol. The cows have been impounded, but what happens to them later on? A clue: the banned Belgian Coca Cola cans that supposedly were destroyed earlier this year, turned up in supermarkets in Uganda and Lithuania.
Published in Euro Metro, 24 september 1999
posted by Pelle at Friday, September 24, 1999
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