French farmers digging in against N.Z. lamb

Press, 4 December 1979, Page 11

French farmers digging in against N.Z. lamb

NZPA Paris A strong anti-New Zealand feeling is being whipped up in French sheepproducing areas. AS the Anglo-French “lamb war” remains deadlocked and the European Economic Community' struggles towards regulating the sheepmeat trade within the Common Agricultural Policy, New Zealand has become the whipping boy.

New Zealand’s dominance of the E.E.C. sheepmeat market, which imports more than one third of its needs and gets 85 per cent of that from New Zealand, has been referred to constantly, as the domestic political storm rages round the French industry.

The popular picture is of the beleagured French shepherd looking anxiously across the English Channel at the glowering form of perfidious Albion ready to send her cheaper lamb as a spearhead for the vast avalanche of even cheaper frozen lamb from New Zealand which will strangle the French industry, driving its farmers to join the long dole queues in the towns. Farmers in the key sheep areas of the Massif Central and the Pyrenees have homed in on New' Zealand in their criticisms. A reported 15,000 farmers demonstrated in Laon, north-east of Paris near the Belgian border, last month.

Farmers’ organisations have been emotivelv outspoken in their attacks and French newspapers have repeatedly told their readers that the lamb Britain is trying to force into France with the backing of a European Court decision is either disguised New Zealand lamb or

lamb displaced in the British market by New Zealand imports. One leading British E.E.C. commentator said recently, “. .. the thought left in the public’s mind is, ‘Keep out New Zealand’s imports from the other side of the globe and you’re two-thirds of the way to licking the crisis’.”

The campaign has been smouldering for the last year and has three central themes: — that 30,000 New' Zealand sheep farmers should not benefit at the expense of 150,000 French sheep farmers.

— That the New Zealand producers are gentlemen farmers living a life of ease in a trade dominated by British-based multinational corporations and producing lamb merely as an unnecessary' by-product to wool; and — That New Zealand possesses an inexhaustible store of lamb ready to sw’amp any market to which it can gain access. In his meeting with the French Minister of Agriculture (Mr Pierre Mehaignerie) on November 29 New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Talboys) was assured that the French Minister did not subscribe to these “myths,” which Mr Talboys had called the “odd and strange things” being saiad about the New Zealand industry. The French farmers’ attitude is encapsulated in an emotive full-page advertisement taken out in the leading daily newspaper, “Le Monde,” on November 27, the day Mr Taiboys arrived in Paris. The advertisement inserted by the Union of Centre-West sheep Organisations, made little attempt at a reasoned examined of the issues.

Under the heading, “French sheep production menaced." it said in part, ... Sheep producers todav are on a tightrope .. . from Normandy to Provence, from the' Pyrenees to the Ardennes, 150,000 of them have mobilised in order to oppose the advance of British hegemony and to defend themselves against a flood of New Zealand sheepmeat on the European market.”

It quoted from the frequent attacks made on the Common Agricultural Policy by the Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) as evidence of a plot by' Britain and New Zealand to undermine the E.E.C. by destroying its foundation, the C.A.P.

It said sheep production in many cases was the sole activity capable of sustaining economic life in the regions and its loss could strip the countryside.

Of the E.E.C. summit in Dublin it said, “. . . the European heads of state cannot, with a stroke of a pen, erase the wealth of nations and accept the individual commercial interests of a free trade which is a survivor of the Commonwealth.

“Men, regions, and flocks wait to know what will be done with them. It would be insupportable to accept that they be sacrificed.”

The Meat Board and the New Zealand Embassy in Paris are struggling to correct the wilder flights of fancy being used in the row.

The New Zealand Government has followed the traditional lines of inviting influential journalists to visit the country, along with persons such as Mr Michel Debatisse, the former president of

the French Farmers’ Union. There is also, in common with other European farm Ministers, a standing invitation for Mr Mehaignerie to visit. Prominent critics of New Zealand are approached with the other side of the story and regular letters are sent out. But an observer said, “Among the people who are influential there is a pretty fair knowledge of the facts. “But for their domestic purposes, attacking New Zealand is a good political argument and they are reluctant to give it up even if it is not true.” The French farmers have always been volatile. The agricultural "relatives” of those now waving banners saying “French sheep farmers destroyed for New Zealander farmers” have in recent years dumped truckloads of potatoes in the streets, hijacked Italian wine tankers and spilled their loads, and hung a freshly slaughtered pig on the wing of President Giscard d’Estaing’s aircraft on a visit to Brittany in protest about various real or imagined ills. The two industries have almost nothing in common except that the animal being reared is a sheep. New Zealand’s national flock of about 62 million sheep raised by 30,000 farmers compares with the French flock of 11 million sheep raised by 150,000 farmers. Where a New Zealand farmer uses dogs, horses, motor-cycles, and tractors in his work, more than half the French farmers have flocks of between 20 and 40 head which he calls by individual names and follows through the hills. In the winter the sheep go indoors and are fed by hand.