Part 17

Opinion polls periodically conducted by GfK Hungaria, a market research group owned by GfK Germany, paint a more mixed picture. On the one hand, even in countries with a devout following of EU accession, such as Romania, support for integration has declined this year. Support in Hungary and Poland, on the other hand, picked up.

Yet, the EU can't seem to get its act together. According to the Danish paper, Berlingske Tidende, Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, rules out a "take it or leave it" ultimatum to the candidates. There will be "real negotiations", he insisted. Not so, says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish president of the EU until Dec 31: "The room for maneuver in negotiations will be very limited ... We have a certain framework, and we stick to it."

Yet, disenchantment should not be exaggerated. Naturally, flood-affected farmers throughout the region - from the Czech Republic to Poland - are vigorously protesting their unequal treatment and the compromises their governments are arm-twisted into making. Still, according to a survey released last December by the European Commission, 60 percent of the denizens of the accession countries support it.

As the endgame nears, the parties to the negotiations are posturing, though. EU enlargement commissioner, Gunter Verheugen, argued a fortnight ago against equalizing support for Poland's 6 million farmers with the subsidies given to the EU's 8 million smallholders. In a typical feat of incongruity he said it will prevent them from modernizing and alienate other professions.

Franz Fischler, the Austrian EU's agriculture commissioner, hinted that miserly production quotas for cereals, meat and dairy products, offered by the EU to the seething applicants, can be augmented. The EU presently provides the candidate countries with funding, within the Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) to support farm investments, to boost processing and marketing of farm and fishery products and to bankroll infrastructure improvements. Hungarian farmers, for instance, are entitled to up to $38 million of SAPARD money annually.

In a thinly veiled threat, Fischler included this in a speech he made in a recent official visit to Estonia:

"The EU enlargement countries should be pleased with the 25 per cent agriculture subsidies, as the member states have not agreed even on that yet, therefore this should be the first goal and only after that can further subsidies be discussed ... It would not be very wise to tell the EU member states that accession countries are not pleased, that would not be positive for the whole process."

Small wonder he was whistled down by irate Polish parliamentarians in an address to a joint session of the parliamentary committees for agriculture and European integration in the Sejm. Poland's fractured farm sector is notoriously inefficient. With one quarter of the labor force it produces less than 4 percent of GDP. But the peasants are well represented in the legislature and soaring unemployment - almost one fifth of all adults - makes every workplace count.

In the meantime, the ten would-be new members of the EU have teamed up to present their case in Brussels. Their ministers of finance, foreign affairs and of agriculture, parliamentary deputies in their finance and farm committees - all issued and issue common statements, position papers, briefings and memoranda of understanding. But no one is inclined to take such ad-hoc alliances among the candidate countries seriously. The disparity between their farm sectors is such that it rules out a single voice.

Moreover, the EU is strained to the limit of its habitual consensus-driven decision making. The breakdown of the European mechanism of deliberation was brought into sharp relief by the way in which the future of the CAP was decided in a series of chats between the leaders of France and Germany in a hotel in Brussels. Their deal was later rubber stamped, unaltered, in a summit of all EU members last month.

The Union is in constitutional and institutional flux. Small and even medium sized members - such as the United Kingdom - are marginalized. As the EU grows to 25 countries, a core of leadership will emerge. It will involve Germany, France and, potentially the UK and Italy.

These will hand down blueprints to be fleshed out by the less significant states and by an increasingly sidelined European Commission and a make-believe European Parliament.

The countries of central and eastern Europe are and will, for a long time, be second class citizens, tolerated merely because they provide cheap, youthful, labor, raw materials and close-by markets for finished goods. The candidates are strategically located between the old continent and booming Asia.

EU enlargement is a thinly disguised exercise in mercantilism tinged with the maudlin ideology of embracing revenant brothers long lost to communism. But beneath the veneer of civility and kultur lurk the cold calculations of realpolitik. The applicant countries - the EU's hinterland - would do well to remember this.

Winning the European CAP

By: Dr. Sam Vaknin

Also published by United Press International (UPI)

According to Herve Gaymard, the French resistance is alive and kicking - at least with regards to the European Commission's proposed reforms of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The French Minister for Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Rural Affairs, in a speech to the misnamed "Real Solutions for the Future" Oxford Farming Conference last week, drew the battle lines.

France - and six other EU countries - intend to stick religiously to a deal struck, tˆte- -tˆte, between the French president and the German chancellor last year. The CAP - which now consumes close to half of the EU's budget - will not be revamped until 2013 at the earliest, though outlays will be frozen in real terms and, starting in 2006, gradually diverted from subsidizing production to environmental and other good causes ("decoupling" and "modulation" in EU jargon).

This upset the EU's ten new members, slated to join as early as May 2004. With spending capped, they are unlikely to enjoy the same pecuniary support bestowed on the veterans, even after 2013. As it is, their agricultural benefits are phased over ten years and face an uncertain future when the CAP is, inevitably and finally, scrapped.

Moreover, France's recalcitrance imperils the crucial Doha round of trade talks. Both the EU and the USA are supposed to reveal their hands by March. The developing countries are already up in arms over promises made by the richer polities in the protracted Uruguay round and then promptly ignored by them.

Agriculture is arguably the poorer members' highest priority. They demand the opening of the rich world's markets, whittling down export and production subsidies and the abrogation of non-tariff trade barriers and practices, such as the profuse application of anti-dumping quotas and duties.

Gaymard proffered the usual woolly mantras of "farm products are more than marketable goods", "France, and Europe in general, need security of food supply", "food cannot be left to the mercy of market forces". Farmers, unlike industrialists - insisted the Minister counterfactually - cannot simply relocate and agrarian pursuits are a pillar of the nation's culture and its attachment to the land.

Yet, it cannot be denied that Gaymard advanced in his speech a few thought-provoking and oft-overlooked points.

He convincingly argued that farm products covered by EU subsidies are rarely in direct competition with the crops of the poor in Africa and Asia. The cotton, rice and groundnut oil subventions generously doled out to growers in the United States - the EU's most vocal critic - harm the third world smallholders and sharecroppers it purports to defend.

The IMF - perceived in Europe as the long and heartless arm of the Americans - has dismantled the coffee regime and marketing structures causing irreparable damage to its indigent growers, Gaymard said.

The CAP, insists Gaymard, does not encourage environmental ills. The policy does not subsidize the husbandry of disease-prone poultry and pigs, nor does it support genetically modified crops. The CAP is also way cheaper than portrayed by its detractors. Food constitutes only 16 percent of the family budget - one third of its share when the CAP was instituted, four decades ago. The CAP amounts to a mere 1 percent of the combined public spending of all EU members. The comparable figure in America is 1.5 percent.

This last argument is, of course, spurious. It ignores the distorting effects of the CAP: exorbitant food prices in the EU, double payments by EU denizens, once as taxpayers and then as consumers, mountains of butter and rivers of milk produced solely for the sake of finagling subsidies out of an inert and bloated bureaucracy and deteriorating relationships with irate trade partners.