English tourists flying to Rodez airport at the beginning of July were alarmed to find the arrivals hall blocked by a delegation of French farmers, press and television cameramen. Tempers were running high over Tony Blair's attacks on European agricultural subsidies, and British tourists, perhaps remembering the lorryloads of British lambs burned alive by French farmers in the 1990s, feared the worst. Heads lowered, they wheeled their trolleys aggressively towards the glass doors. In fact, the farmers were there in a spirit of reconciliation—Sourire pour les touristes anglais (Smile for the English tourists)—a campaign devised by the farmers' union (FNSEA) as an antidote to the bickering over the CAP. Offering local wine, charcuterie and cheese, the farmers were hoping to win over British hearts, minds and palates to their point of view. Instead, the herd of terrified Brits stampeding for the exit showed how easy it is to misinterpret the message in Franco-British relations.
"Tony Blair's not wrong to question the CAP, but his 40 per cent of the budget against 2 per cent of the population is simplistic, la démagogie," said Jacques Bernat, in his fifties, a third-generation sheep farmer, active in many ancillary aspects of agricultural life. "Before it became mixed up with money, the CAP was a politique" (not politics but a thought-out, long-term policy). "The CAP united Europe. Later there were terrible abuses, but at heart the idea of controlling the market was a good one. I admire Blair, but agriculture isn't like other industries. Every aspect is at the mercy of the weather. In the 2003 drought, the Spanish sent us feed; this year they've got problems and we're helping them. Without this positive idea of Europe, many farmers would have gone under. Since Europe's been united and the market's been managed, we've had no famines. That's new. More, for 50 years people have been increasingly well fed. You wouldn't have that without rules." Unlike the British view of the CAP, dominated by money, many French see it as sustaining both an ideal and a well-provisioned table.
There is much anger in France that Blair has reduced the policy to statistics: "It comes from misunderstanding the nature of farming in France," says Olivier Serieye, president of the young farmers' branch of the Aveyron FNSEA. "We don't have and we don't want multinationals owning half a département, farming intensively as you have in Britain. We want to encourage family-run farms. Here in the Aveyron we have over 13,000 individual farmers. In the Midi-Pyrénées region, whose capital, Toulouse, is the home of the Airbus, there are more farmers than people working in aeronautics."
But why should Europe pay so much to the French? "If we renationalise agriculture," explains Bernat, "each nation looking after its own, it's no longer Europe." Une certaine idée de l'Europe: you either believe in it or you don't. But why should nearly a quarter of the CAP go to one country? "Because," he says, "France has the biggest beef herd and the largest area of cultivated land in Europe, much of it in mountain or difficult regions." But France is a rich country: surely it should pay a greater share for its own farmers? Now he is exasperated, for I keep pitting base money against an ideal: "If Europe abandons this backbone of an agricultural policy, which is common to all European countries, Europe is dead."
Olivier Serieye's answer to the same question cleverly addresses the British obsession with economics: "France receives 21 per cent of the CAP to produce 20.4 per cent of Europe's agriculture. Britain receives 9 per cent and produces 7.5 per cent." On average, each French farmer receives E12,456 direct subsidy a year, his British counterpart E11,210, with a European average of E4,757 and the Danes getting the most at E17,433 a year. Britain, while trying to cut France's subsidy, has protected its own richest farmers by persistently vetoing attempts to limit how much any one farmer can receive—there are 330 British farmers each getting more than E300,000 a year, against 30 French.
There are two distinct ways of looking at the CAP: one is the British view of how the French in the 1950s and 1960s stitched up the Germans and then the British in order to rake in most for themselves. The other is the French view, that family farms—not industrial combines—are a public service: they produce quality food, unobtainable elsewhere. If these farms are allowed to disappear, so will this food. Our communal duty is to keep this (French) cultural heritage alive. Both points of view are valid: one is justifiably bitter, and the other epicurean, self-satisfied, self-regarding but nevertheless appealing. At some point in our holiday abroad experiences, we have all been short-changed or cheated. Does that stop us going abroad next year? Usually the pleasures outweigh the inconveniences: the CAP costs each European about E2 a week. The first attempt by the young Aveyronnais farmers to win over tourists at Rodez airport was misinterpreted. Changing their approach, they tried again. The tourists tentatively tasted the food, smiled back at the farmers and began a friendly dialogue.
