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| | CAP Health Check Overlooks what is truly at Stake in the Agricultural Sector | 25 February 2008 |
The European Commission, having no simulation model with which to carry out a bona fide CAP health check, has made unsuitable proposals.
The CAP Health Check presented by the European Commission is of utmost importance; it carries the seeds of the CAP of tomorrow. The Commission has validated the principle of opening up to the global market and abandoning Community preference. It postulates that the agricultural sector will perform better and that prices will remain high and profitable in the absence of government intervention.
In fact, this health check is anything but: it in no way evaluates the CAP and has issued a diagnosis that does not take the unique characteristics of agriculture into account. Consequently, if CAP reforms were to follow its recommendations, they would endanger the single integrated policy that transformed the European Union into the world's leading agricultural powerhouse:
The Commission has no simulation model and no indicators with which to place the CAP in an overall strategic context that would make it possible to select the most suitable objectives.
The WOAGRI model shows that liberalizing markets without implementing mechanisms to regulate supply will cause price volatility to persist, destabilizing the entire sector.
The Commission has been naively optimistic in assuming that tomorrow's world will be free from the risk of supply shortages and will hold the promise of perfect supply-demand adjustment.
Consequently, it has proposed reconsidering whether intervention systems should even exist. In short, it maintains that defining a new CAP amounts to dismantling the policy. This is a denial of reality disastrous for Europe's future.
The Commission is proposing to establish, in five years, a risk analysis for the post-2013 period, with Member States in charge of managing those risks.
It's as if the Ministry of Defense were to plan a threat assessment only after observing the world for five years, while in the meantime neutralizing all operational means of intervention.
Europe must urgently devote its energies to finding the answers to five fundamental questions:
Where do the objectives of food security fit in when trade is subjected to the fragile nature of communication channels in a dangerous world?
Where are the stances in favor of a new CAP that would be capable of tackling the strategic challenges related to agriculture (food, green chemistry and the environment)? These challenges cannot be overcome by ceding to market dynamics alone.
Where are the proposals for assessing and managing market risks – so important to ensure stable production and impossible to carry out without government intervention?
Where is the thinking on the essential link between agriculture and development in the least developed countries?
What, finally, has become of the Commission's ability to function as a proposal-driven body intended to spur policy considerations in the Council and Parliament?
The WOAGRI model will make it possible to simulate those policies best suited to seeking an optimal balance between economic efficiency and food security. This is the direction policy should be heading if the CAP is to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
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Advocating for
agricultural market
regulation and global
food governance | |
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