By Alan Osborn

We should have known better than to believe the French last year when they said they wanted a new, reformed common agricultural policy with lower subsidies for farmers. That, incredibly, was what French president Nicholas Sarkozy said in September 2007. 

Incredible is right.

A year later Paris has thrown such pledges into the dustbin.

Late November’s French government paper setting out ideas for a meeting of EU agriculture ministers, when the future of the CAP was to be discussed, makes clear that France wants to preserve the traditional shape of the CAP with protection of farmers’ incomes uppermost.

More specifically, France wants to use the world-wide economic recession to argue its case for “community preference” - or keeping foreign food out of Europe. This follows a ministerial meeting earlier that month when France led a campaign to cut back the share of EU farm payments for environmental measures from a proposed 8% to 5% over the protest of several member states.

You’d never think that France was actually the president of the EU for the later half of 2008 and therefore supposed to present policies on behalf of all 27 EU members.

It’s true that this Friday’s meeting was to discuss the long-term future of the CAP rather than its immediate problems. So much the worse. If France had its way and ministers agree on plans to protect and enhance farmers’ incomes then a realistic chance for CAP changes will have been lost for perhaps many years and the Doha round of trade liberalisation – which depends on open markets – would have been doomed.

Thankfully, reform-minded countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden did rein in the French and re-inforce the EU’s free trade credentials by refusing to back Paris’ CAP document as a basis for lonmg-term discussions in 2009. But Sarkozy needs domestic support at the moment and pushing farmers’ interests is one way of achieving it in France.