Once again, the “barbarian” is at the farm gates. Last week Fischler proposed the most radical revamp to the EU’s agricultural policy in its 41-year history. His reforms would transform the EU’s notoriously expensive and protectionist Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which at 40 billion euros a year gobbles up half the European Union’s budget. As it stands, Europe pays its 7 million farmers subsidies linked to the amount they produce, a system that has led to massive surpluses. During the 1980s the program generated much-derided lakes of wine and mountains of butter that were dumped on the world market, depressing prices and hurting developing countries. The system promoted wealth disparities within Europe, too. Under CAP, 80 percent of subsidies go to 20 percent of the largest farms.
The new plan would give farmers a single direct payment based on their earlier subsidies. The reforms are primarily meant to rationalize production by encouraging farmers to grow only what the market demands. But they raise a far more fundamental issue: the role of rural Europe in a 21st-century economy. Fischler’s plan isn’t so much about cutting costs–he estimates it will save only about 200 million euros a year–as about transforming the countryside. The 20 percent reduction of subsidies over the next six years will be put toward rural development–which, in addition to creating greener and friendlier farming methods, aims to create new sources of income for rural areas.
Europe’s hard-core farm lobby resists the idea that its easily romanticized countryside needs to change: the French, in particular, have mocked the idea of funds being diverted from l’agriculteurau coiffeur–from the farmer to the hairdresser. Earlier attempts to divert CAP money from agriculture to retraining, tourism and other development schemes “have been watered down as the realpolitik of CAP bites,” says Neil Ward, who teaches rural development at the University of Leeds. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that economic diversification is the only way forward for rural Europe, which comprises more than 80 percent of EU territory and 40 percent of its population. Employment in agriculture is falling across the EU: between 1987 and 1997, one in three farming jobs was lost in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. “The European rural world is evolving,” notes Claire Lelievre, editor of Village magazine, a bimonthly devoted to encouraging a rural renaissance in France. “Agriculture cannot continue to be the only preoccupation.”
Fair enough, but how to revive remote communities faced with high unemployment, an aging population and dwindling public services? The answer, according to European governments and LEADER, the EU’s rural development program, can be divided into two broad themes: savvy integration into urban economies or glorious isolation from them. Some areas have courted the global economy, training rural residents to work at call centers or multinationals and using technology to integrate communities into wider global networks. Swaths of southern Europe have done precisely the opposite, capitalizing on their distance from urban life–be it through agritourism, the promotion of local crafts, foods or natural beauty.
The change is being forced, in part, by shifting attitudes toward the country in Europe’s cities. Recent food scares and increased concern about the environment and animal welfare have turned consumers against big farms and big subsidies. European taxpayers, whose food bills are about 44 percent higher than average world prices thanks to tariffs and subsidies, have grown suspicious of the intensive farming techniques encouraged by CAP.
Reform has also gained new urgency because of European enlargement. The prospect of 10 new states, many with heavy agricultural sectors, set to join the EU in 2004 makes CAP untenably expensive, particularly for the northern European countries that bankroll most of the subsidy scheme. Already, farmers in would-be EU states like Poland and the Czech Republic are worried that with reforms, they’ll get a mere fraction of what their Western European colleagues have grown to expect.
In many places, the countryside is already being transformed demographically as stressed-out urbanites search for a bit of peace and quiet. In greenbelts around London, Amsterdam and Paris, commuters have extended the suburbs into rural areas; the British rural population is growing for the first time in 150 years. Yuppies are moving into Identikit housing communities in eastern Ireland, while in Germany, rich urbanites are snapping up half-timbered farmhouses in the Brandenburg countryside around Berlin. Southern France, the coasts of Spain and Portugal and bits of Wales have seen a recent influx of wealthy retirees.
Not all these newcomers are a boon. In places like the former farming village of Camaleno, in northern Spain, city dwellers have revived the area by buying up abandoned houses for vacation rentals. But second homes don’t help build a rural tax base, a school population or a community spirit. “Life is better now–we work less and get more money,” says Isidoro Mier, Camaleno’s 66-year-old mayor. “But I don’t know whether this will be enough to keep the young people in the village, and without them, the future looks bleak.”
To combat the problem, some countries have begun programs to encourage urbanites to settle down in the country. The Finns offer support and subsidies to second-home owners who choose to stay at their vacation homes year-round. In Ireland and Spain, NGOs are starting rural resettlement projects, encouraging less prosperous city dwellers to relocate to the country. In 1990, Jim Connolly set up the Rural Resettlement Initiative, funded by the Irish government, to ease Dublin overcrowding and provide an employment pool for deprived rural areas. Five hundred families later, Connolly claims to have freed up tens of millions of euros’ worth of housing in urban areas and filled empty local-authority housing in western Ireland.
What will really draw city dwellers to the country, of course, are jobs. Jacinta Roche, a single mother of one, moved from Dublin to Castlebar (population: 6,500) under Connolly’s program to give her 3-year-old son a house and a safe environment. A qualified hatha yoga instructor, Roche was surprised to find among her students employees of companies like Baxter, American Power Conversion, Data Dimensions and Johnson Industries–all lured to the Castlebar region by low corporate taxes and high government subsidies. In England, too, many multinationals are shifting operations to rural areas. Science parks and biotech companies have begun to pop up in former farmlands around Cambridge.
A vision of what the future might look like is taking shape. Last year pharmaceuticals accounted for a third of Irish exports, while food and live animals were a mere 6 percent. Agriculture now supplies only 3.4 percent of the country’s GDP. Travel through Ireland’s eastern counties, and you’re more likely to find a sleek, glass box housing a call center or a software firm than a working farm. Whole-purpose-built industry towns have sprung up in fields. Until 12 years ago Kildare, a half hour’s drive from Dublin, was horse-breeding country. Then Intel bought a former stud farm, invested 3.2 billion euros and turned a green field into the company’s largest manufacturing site outside America.
Of course, not every rural region has the luck of the Irish, whose English-language skills, high educational level and good transport links helped create the so-called Celtic Tiger boom. “The EU authorities keep telling us to turn our farms into rural houses for tourism and ecological production, but this is very hard for people who have got a very elementary education,” says Eduardo Navarro, general secretary of Spain’s agricultural union, COAG. Only 2.5 percent of farmers in Spain have university degrees.
So in many places activists are encouraging locals to play to their strengths. Bisacquino, near Corleone in central Sicily, is the kind of Italian village where wizened old men lean on their sticks, watching the sun make its progress across the town square. In their day, you either farmed–or left. Now Giuseppe Vetrano and other LEADER staffers in Bisacquino try to convince the population that their future doesn’t necessarily mean heading to Palermo or to northern Italy’s industrial cities. The notion of the city as the center of the economy is so firmly rooted in the local mentality that “they think we’re crazy,” says Vetrano.
His staff have given courses on Web design and rug making, and have funneled Brussels money into grants for artisans. One LEADER-funded project sits on top of a nearby hill amid apricot and cherry trees. In a concrete hangar stocked with tools bought with 65,000 euros in EU funding, two local brothers, Giuseppe and Giuliano Colletti, restore and build organs for Italian churches. “The future here is local,” notes LEADER’s Alfonso Guarino, who is trying to encourage villagers to focus on the things they do well: working with ceramics and glass, and making pasta and cakes. “What we can offer is something cities can’t–a sense of care and pride in artisanship. It’s about quality, not quantity.”
If Fischler’s reforms pass–and European agriculture ministers will only begin to debate them this week–those who choose to continue farming will have to adopt the same mantra. Brussels subsidies will not reward huge, intensive farms so much as green ones. Farmers will have to preserve what Europe doesn’t want to lose, be it pristine landscapes or local specialty cheeses. Even as the economic reality changes, some parts of the countryside may benefit from staying the same.
