CAP | Jon Worth

Cow - CC / Flickr

I managed to avoid the milk-farmer chaos in Brussels on Thursday and Friday – hundreds of tractors driving slowly to bring protests about low milk prices to the European Council. But what exactly are the farmers whingeing about, and what should be done about it?

This piece from EUObserver has more – it costs €33 to produce 100 litres of milk on a Belgian farm, and wholesalers are buying milk for just €19 per 100 litres. The farmers would ideally like a price of €44 per 100 litres. In any normal sector of the economy the high-price producers would go out of business, and those that can produce at a lower price would get the business, profiting from economies of scale or better technology. Look at how OPEC works – reduce production to drive up prices. Sorry to put it bluntly, but if the prices are too low, then some cows are going to have to be slaughtered.

Another alternative would be to appeal to customers that might be more inclined to buy local rather than imported milk, and pay a premium for the privilege – some equivalents of the British Farm Standard scheme might do to the job.

But what do the farmers do instead? They come complaining to the European Commission, and governments in each of the Member States, whining that something should be done to help their plight. It’s the EU’s plan to phase out the quota system for milk that is to blame they bleat – the very quotas that were introduced in the 1980s to prevent over-production of milk and were detested by milk farmers at that time. Keep the quotas, keep our prices up!

The EUObserver piece quotes a farmer: “It’s not a problem of the stores, it’s a problem of a regulation by the states and overall by Europe” – no. The problem is with the farmers who cannot except the logic of simple market forces. If the price of milk is too low, then produce less. Don’t produce at a loss and then go begging for assistance from the EU.

(Apologies if this article is really wide of the mark – I’ve scoured the web and cannot find anything except hot air and hollow rhetoric from farmers on this – if I’m missing some fundamental point to the economics behind this then please do tell me in the comments)

Germany Map - CC / Flickr

What’s up with Germany? What do they have to hide?

I attended a press conference organised by farmsubsidy.org yesterday entitled “Who wants to be a farm subsidy millionaire?” where Jack Thurston, Brigitte Alfter and others presented the latest data on CAP payments using the latest statistics on agriculture spending due to released at the end of April by the Member States… only no data for Germany has been released. This is explained by the German agriculture minister Ilse Aigner in a press release here. The supposed reason? That the European Commission’s requirement to publish the data is against German laws on privacy. But Germany actually agreed to the openness regulation in the first place and, let us not forget, this is public money from EU funds – surely it’s a matter of principle that citizens can trace where the money has gone? I wonder whether Aigner’s background in the CSU representing an area of rural Bavaria has anything to do with it? Stern has more general background on agriculture subsidies here.

This builds on a patchy commitment to transparency among German MEPs in the European Parliament. According to a post subsequently removed from Europa-Transparent (Google cache here), and also covered by the Frankfurter Allgemeine here, Silvana Koch-Mehrin has been grumbling about parlorama.eu, a website that publishes statistics from the European Parliament about attendance records of MEPs. As I write the Parlorama site is closed – again – because someone I presume is threatening them. Koch-Mehrin complains that the site does not take into account the time she took away from the EP on maternity leave, but even with that in her attendance was not exemplary – so citizens should know. And Koch-Mehrin should rather have run a campaign on maternity leave for MEPs (i.e. temporary replacement MEPs from election lists – currently not possible) – Åsa Westlund and Eluned Morgan would be allies in that.

I also seem to recall that it was German MEPs – of all parties – that were most against the publication of the European Parliament’s internal report on MEPs’ expenses, the report that Chris Davies caused controversy by leaking. Then there is the infamous RTL film about MEPs milking the signing in system, with German Green MEP Hiltrud Breyer running into a wall in order to escape the cameras.

With support for the EU not at the levels it once was in Germany, and with brewing discontent with the national political process as a result of the grand coalition, Germany has to be a bit careful. It’s not as easy as it once was to just assume that people will think the best of their politicians.