French farmers resist Mansholt's plan

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32566, 27 March 1971, Page 19

French farmers resist Mansholt's plan

(By PHIL NEWSOM of United Press International, through N,Z.P.A.)

PARIS, March 26. Ever since the beginning of the European Economic Community in 1957, the 25 million farmworkers in the Common Market have been the main source of its troubles. France, as the Market’s greatest agricultural producer, has threatened to break up the Market over the issue of farm supports. And, on the same issue, France may yet veto Britain’s third attempt to gain entry into the Market The farmers of the Six are a vocal and important minority; that they are capable of violent expression has just been proved by 80,000 of them in a destructive demonstration in Brussels. The French fanner may be taken as typical. In the first place, he like the Belgian or British coalminer, is doing exactly what his father and grandfather did before him, and in the same place. He sees no reason either to change or to move, and he feels that a deliberate attempt is being made to drive him off the land and into the city. And it is. Dr Sicco Mansholt, the E.E.C.'s Agricultural Commissioner. wants to take

more than half the farmers out of agriculture in the next 10 years, under a programme of re-education costing thousands of millions of dollars. Huge sums already are being spent in support of agri-

culture; for dairy products alone, such aid came to nearly SUSIOOOm. Yet one enterprising statistician has calculated that the amount of stockpiled butter that no-one wants equals the weight of the entire population of Austria. Dr Mansholt claims that the trouble lies in the small, uneconomic farms whose owners barely scrape a living, while the large, effici-ently-run farms reap fortunes out of subsidies. In their forceful expression of dissatisfaction, the farmers heap manure outside Government offices, dump produce on the roads, and pelt officials with eggs, tomatoes, apples or whatever is in season and handiest. The farmers cite the Common Market’s own figures to prove their case. These show that a French industrial worker takes home the equivalent of 97c for each of 2078 hours worked in an average year. Farm statisticians say that a farmer works 50 per cent more hours a year for an income one-third less. The French peasants, and the other farmworkers inside the Market, say that no matter how high the subsidies are now, they are not high enough. It seems probable that the French people, just emerging from a highly protectionist society, fear change more than they dislike Britain.

So far as France is concerned, the Common Market is a going concent upon Which British entry would have an effect as yet undetermined. Therefore, they say, if

Britain is to come in, she must pay the price in support of the Community's Agricultural Policy. And the British think that that price could reach SUSI9OOm by 1978. It could be too high.