Tuesday 14 April, Emiel Geurts was a guest speaker at the RICH research group The Eighties: Austerity, Reform, Conflict on the 'greening' of the Common Agricultural Policy. Not long ago, farmers in Brussels and across the EU protested against plans to green European agriculture. That part of the European Green Deal has since been systematically watered down.
However, the greening of European Agricultural policy has a much longer history, as Geurts demonstrated in his presentation. From the 1970s onwards, the environmental impact of European agriculture became a subject of growing concern, leading to European policies on, for example, pesticides, nitrogen and water quality. In his presentation, however, Geurts focused on a very different angle: the battle for funding.
European agricultural policy has traditionally accounted for by far the largest share of the European budget. Consequently, the issue of greening Agricultural policy also became a battle over the budget. From the 1960s onwards, agricultural policy had served to provide farmers with a regular income by guaranteeing a fixed price for products through subsidies. However, this system led to overproduction, resulting in the well-known 'lakes of milk', 'mountains of butter' and 'seas of wine'.
Consequently, a debate arose in the 1980s regarding the reform of this funding. Price support was phased out, which encouraged farmers to produce for the (global) market. But these reforms also raised the question of what consequences these market incentives would have for the farming community in Europe and what the environmental consequences would be. Was the environment better served by small-scale family farms or by efficient but intensive large-scale farms? Geurts demonstrated that the debate on the greening of European agriculture was not confined to circles of farmers and environmentalists, but was also taking place within finance ministries.
Next meeting
The next meeting of The Eighties will take place on 12 May at 3.30 pm in E.9.14. Dr Eric Jagdew will speak about the presidency of Ramsewak Shankar, who was president of Suriname in the late 1980s.