Miles Collins

Making sense of EU food policies

Certain blog posts arise from the most unlikely beginings and this one is no exception. What started off as simple observation became a discussion followed by research which I hope will prompt some discussion and thought from those who read this.

Last week my parents came over for a day visit and I took them on a tour of my favourite haunts for walking and photography. After lunch we stopped off at Wasps Nest, a great place to see birds of prey hovering over the fields in search of food. As we approached one of my parking places we saw what looked like a huge pile of sand at the edge of one of the many vast fields of wheat which makes up much of the surrounding landscape. The sand was in fact wheat. The combine harvesters were busy in the fields and this seemed quite clearly the seperating of the ‘wheat from the chaff’ as we say in England. I had never seen anything like this before and we wondered why it had been dumped there and not stored for animal feed at least. I made a passing remark about it being a food mountain and I hoped that it would not go to waste regardless of the quality…

The sheer size of the pile of this stuff struck me as being such a waste if it indeed was (I am sure it will not be used for human or animal consumption because of its location) and I began to wonder about the size of the food mountains ‘proper’. I decided to park my car in front of the pile to give you some idea of the size of this particular one….

So where does the term ‘food mountain’ come from?

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduced in the 1960’s was a system devised to offer financial support for farmers in the European Union countries. The crux of the policy was to introduce a minimum price for part of what they produced and its aim was to increase productivity. The intended knock on effect of this was for the farmers to earn a decent living whilst being able to offer the customer a guaranteed supply at a moderate price. In order to offer stability to the internal market the policy would buy produce at a predetermined price and impose charges on cheaper imports. Now farmers began to produce more food because the CAP guaranteed subsidies based on increased productivity, the more food you produced the greater the subsidies. Come the late 70’s and 80’s subsidised goods had become so overproduced they couldn’t sell it and this led to the storing of food which became known as ‘mountains’ and ‘lakes’.

Understandably CAP came in for criticism from many a quater. The policy had a particularly adverse affect on developing countries trying to sell their produce into EU countries with their farmers struggling against a tide of charges and increased legislation. By the 1990’s the guaranteed minimum price level had been largely replaced by compensation pay outs whenever the market price fell below a set level and all the time the ‘mountains’ have continued to rise. Looking into my own country’s (UK) state of affairs I was staggered to discover that up to a third of all food produced in the UK for human consumption is thrown away which, according to the UN amounts to some £20 billion! The UK recently came clean in admitting that the current EU mountain stands at some 13 million tonnes of rice, wheat, sugar and milk. If you want something to wash all of that down with then try one of the 265 million bottles of wine left in storage. Now that’s some lake.

It seems incredible that faced with this waste we can’t help those countries in such desperate need let alone aleviate the weekly struggles of men, women and families up and down the country who have had to face huge price hikes in basic food items.