AGENDA 2000 - WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE RURAL ENVIRONMENT?

Alastair Rutherford

In July this year the long awaited and much leaked 'Agenda 2000' document was launched by President Santer at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Immediate response to it by the environment lobby has been quite hostile - expressing disappointment that 'Agenda 2000' is failing to deliver anything concrete for the rural environment. Such reaction is clearly missing the point, and is not setting the proposals for agriculture and rural areas in the wider policy context. The majority of the 'Agenda 2000' document is about the economic and political structure of the European Union in the next century. In it the European commission is responding to a wide range of dramatically changing global and domestic (EU) political events. CAP reform and the development of integrated rural policies must be seen in this broader context.

A radical reform of the CAP has never been on DGVI's (Directorate-General for Agriculture) agenda. Since the publication of its Agricultural Strategy paper in December 1995, DGVI's policies for reform have been evolution not revolution, building on the principles established in the 1992 reform. This process involves a gradual transformation of the CAP to enable it to respond to a wider range of issues but principally concerns over the development of global market and trade policy. To make sense of the proposals within 'Agenda 2000' for the CAP and the rural environment, this economic focus must be recognised as the central thread running through the agricultural and rural package.

However, 'Agenda 2000' also shows that the European Commission recognises a range of other factors that must be taken into account in the development of rural policy and further reform of the CAP. These include: the food safety and animal welfare concerns of consumers; the declining economic relevance of agriculture in the rural economy; the increasing importance of the natural environment; and the simplification and decentralisation of policy mechanisms.

This rational for much broader and more integrated rural policy has clear links back to the 'Cork Declaration'. However, to understand why 'Cork' is not more prominent in 'Agenda 2000' one need only look at to the very hostile reaction to the 'Cork Declaration' from some very powerful interest groups and in particular COPA, the European farmers organisation. A certain way of sinking any aspirations for integrated rural development would have been to mention 'Cork' within 'Agenda 2000'.

So what are the strengths and weaknesses of 'Agenda 2000'? and how to maximise its potential for integrated rural development and livestock systems? Two issues that have a direct relevance for LSIRD are; the retention of headage payments for beef cattle; and proposals for a transformation of the Less Favoured Areas Scheme (LFAs).

Firstly; the proposals for the beef sector entrench the use of headage payments and this must be viewed with deep disappointment. Headage payments encourage stocking densities that cause environmental damage and prejudices whatever social or environmental policy is built upon it. A shift to livestock area payments - reflecting the shift to arable area payments in the 1992 reforms - would have been a major step towards a more integrated livestock support system.

So why did the Commission fail to propose livestock area payments, which are also intrinsically compatible with the aims of its agricultural trade policy? My view is that it is because livestock area payments would, as yet, prove very complex, if not impossible to implement. Before DGVI will consider moving towards livestock area payments they will require robust solutions to two outstanding questions; how to relate area payment rates to the productive capacity of the land? and secondly, how to resolve the problem of applying area payments to land with shared grazing rights? Solve these two problems for the Commission and we would be much closer to a European livestock area payments system.

However, there is much in 'Agenda 2000' that can be welcomed, particularly if one takes a slightly longer term view and accepts that this document is laying important foundations for the development of integrated policy in the future. In this respect the Commission's proposals for the transformation of the LFA scheme into a basic system to maintain and promote low-input farming systems because of their high landscape and nature value must be seen as an exciting prospect. How the Commission proposes to do this is not explained in 'Agenda 2000'. But this leaves opportunities to influence thinking on this using the research and ideas that the LSIRD network aims to encourage.

Alastair Rutherford
(Senior Agricultural Policy Office Countryside Commission)

Countryside Commission
Ortona House 110,
Hills Rd
Cambridge CB2 1LQ UK

Tel: +44 1223 354462
Fax: +44 1223 315850

The views in this article are personal and cannot be ascribed to the Countryside Commission.

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