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PARIS - After 46 years of shovelling farm subsidies to its richer, more polluting farmers, France yesterday took a historic step towards a greener and fairer European agriculture policy.
Paris announced that from next year it would confiscate more than 20 per cent of the billions of euros of European taxpayers' money paid to its ranch-like cereals farms and divert the cash to hill farmers, grazing land, shepherds and organic agriculture.
The announcement brings to an end almost half a century of official hypocrisy in which French Governments have talked about protecting "family farms" and "quality food" but allowed the bulk of European largesse to flow to chemical-assisted, hedge-free, cereals-ranching in northern, central and eastern France.
Although Brussels first encouraged Governments to "rob" rich farmers to subsidise small, traditional farms four years ago, Paris remained the only European Government to insist that large cereals farms should receive their full, traditional European Union payments.
Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier announced yesterday that this policy would end from next year. The largest French cereals farms - which can receive up to 800,000 ($2 million) in annual subsidies - will lose 20 per cent of their EU cash.
Others will be "taxed" at a lower rate. Overall, 1.4 billion a year will be transferred from big farms to traditional farms and schemes to promote biodiversity.
The money will be used, above all, to help struggling beef, sheep and goat farmers and to encourage the slowly gathering movement towards "bio" or organic agriculture.
President Nicolas Sarkozy believes this historic shift in French attitudes is essential to preserve what remains of traditional farming communities.
His Government also recognises that a change from an increasingly indefensible policy of "big farmers first" is essential if the Common Agricultural Policy is to survive.
"This is the price we must pay to defend the CAP," Barnier said.
A radical re-examination of the CAP is due in four years. Sarkozy recognises he can no longer do what President Jacques Chirac did: defend the CAP as a shield for small, traditional farms and quality food while most subsidies went to wheat, barley and rice ranches. Under the present rules, the 10 largest French farms receive an average of 500,000 each. The smallest farms receive an average of 500 each.
A cynical interpretation of the policy shift might be that France is preparing a more eco-friendly argument to hold on to the 10 billion it receives each year from the CAP budget.
Small farmers' groups complained that the reforms did not go far enough.
But the change in French attitudes does suggest it may be easier to rebuild the CAP in 2013: moving away from subsidies for mass production of food and towards aid for small rural communities, traditional livestock farming and organic agriculture.
Only 2 per cent of French farm land and vineyards is officially regarded as "organic".
THE TRUTH BEHIND THE POSTCARD IMAGE
There is a traditional postcard image of French farming, fostered by successive governments. Small villages of warm stone nestle on hillsides, surrounded by beef cattle reared mostly on grass.
Dairy cows, goats and sheep produce luscious raw-milk cheeses.
This is the type of French farming which is defended by Paris in its marathon trade row with Washington, which has seen European Union barriers to hormone-soaked American beef and United States barriers to traditional Roquefort sheep cheeses.
Such human-sized French farms do exist - just. But they are not the real powerhouse of French agriculture and they are not the type of farming which has been encouraged by Paris in the 46 years since the Common Agricultural Policy was created.
Drive out of Paris for 150km in almost any direction and you enter a green desert.
The Ile de France, the flatter parts of the Loire country, much of northern and eastern France and parts of Normandy and Brittany have been turned into a vast, chemical-soaked plain for the high-intensity production of cereals.
As a result, France has become the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world and now French rivers and streams are among the most polluted in Europe.
The average size of French farms has soared in the past 30 years and the number of holdings has plummeted from 2.4 million in the mid-1960s to just over 600,000 today.
So much for "defending the traditional French farming model", the argument tripped out by French politicians for decades to justify the billions of euros spent on the CAP.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, if he changes nothing else, will at least have punctured one of the greatest, and least challenged, lies of French public life.
- INDEPENDENT
