French farmers and government officials are fond of saying that the word ''culture'' is contained within the term ''agriculture'' for a reason. Farming is a way of life, the French argue, which governments are entitled to protect from the impact of ''mindless trade liberalization'' in a way that they ought not protect, say, refrigerator manufacturers. The French have a strong attachment to the ideal of the bucolic countryside, and a change in agricultural policy can be blown up into a threat to national identity.
Those attitudes are important because they make France the leading supporter of the European Union's costly protectionist agricultural policy, and the major opponent of any serious change. That intransigence hurts developing countries, where farmers often find themselves competing with the artificially low prices of subsidized European produce that gets dumped on the international market.
As members of the World Trade Organization meet in Cancún, Mexico, next month, they'll be trying to overcome French protectionism that threatens to stall momentum toward expanding global trade. Great Britain, the Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries tend to be more open to change -- something that is not surprising because they pay in more to the European farm support system than they take out. (American trade negotiators support reducing subsidies and trade barriers on agriculture -- though their sentiments are not always shared by the farm lobby in Congress.)
Europe's protectionism stems from the Continent's political determination to sustain agriculture even when it makes little economic sense. European farms are, on average, far smaller than those in the United States -- the European Union has more than three times as many farms even though it has only about one-third as much cultivated farmland. The idea of bigger farms frightens the French, just like the idea of depopulated farming communities. But it is possible to advance some of the more sensible goals of Europe's agriculture policy, like land conservation and environmentalism, without losing touch with reality. Europe loses about 3 percent of its farming population a year, and more consolidation, in the form of larger-scale farming and an abandonment of absurdly inefficient production, is inevitable. And while there is no question that Europe has a right, even an obligation, to spend money on rural development and the protection of open space, it is not sensible to believe that every village that was inhabited in Charlemagne's day must be sustained. Moreover, Europe's common agricultural policy in its present form does not always advance the humble family farmers often pointed to in its defense. Larger corporate agricultural interests get a disproportionate share of farm aid, giving Europeans who pay for the subsidies the worst of both worlds. And the current subsidies actually often hurt the environment by promoting overproduction.Continue reading the main story
A sensible compromise would provide government support for farmers who protect land from development and maintain high environmental standards. But it would not pay farmers to grow crops they couldn't sell under normal circumstances and dump the result on the global market, driving prices down too low for poor countries to make a profit on their own exports. The European Commission recently moved in that direction. It proposed reforms to the common agricultural policy that would stop linking farmers' subsidies to the amount they produce. But farmers across Europe hated the idea. ''We don't want to get checks simply because we live somewhere remote and are nice people,'' said Franz-Josef Feiter, who heads the Committee of Agricultural Organizations in the European Union, the main farm lobby in Brussels. ''Ours are industrialized societies with high wages and we must assure similarly good wages for our farmers.''
France led the fight against the commission's reform and, with the help of German allies, was able to water down the final deal announced in June. Now, on the eve of the W.T.O. gathering in Cancún, European and American trade officials are negotiating the details of a common approach to reducing their harmful restraints to trade in farm goods. If this effort is to succeed, France must come to terms with the fact that at the very least, the time has come to renounce the dumping of any subsidized farm products on world markets, and to open its domestic market to imports from poor nations, free of any tariffs or quotas.
Harvesting Poverty: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/harvestingpoverty.Continue reading the main story