LONDON -- Reform of the European Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, is essential if the European Union's expenditures are to be contained and remain acceptable to European voters as a whole. This summer the European Commission floated some proposals for changes designed not to reduce the overall burden but to rearrange the way in which subsidies are paid.
The Commission wanted more aid to go to rural conservation and less to production. A change of this kind would reduce overproduction and the extent to which European farm products are dumped in overseas markets. Such dumping pushes down world prices, harming the exports and agricultural industries of developing countries.
Unfortunately, even these limited proposals have been opposed by the major beneficiaries of CAP: France, Spain, Portugal, Austria and Ireland. Their agricultural ministers wrote to various European newspapers defending CAP. They denied that the approximately $39 billion cost of the policy, to say nothing of the higher prices consumers must pay for agricultural products, is too much. Ministers' attempts to rebut the charge that CAP damages the exports of developing countries were specious and totally unconvincing to rational people. They seemed to think that European aid to developing countries justified the distortions caused by CAP.