Too Much Plenty

From time immemorial the European peasant has prayed for plentiful harvests. Yet plenty has not necessarily been good for the Common Market's 11 million farmers. Blessed by good crops and improved farming techniques, they have accumulated huge surpluses of agricultural products, and are swamped by tomatoes, cauliflowers, apples, plums and pears. In Germany alone, the government has had to buy and store some 80,000 tons of surplus butter, which is now known as the Butterberg (butter mountain).

For years the six Common Market partners discussed the problem of opening their frontiers to one another's agricultural produce. Because powerful farmers' associations in each country had to be considered and appeased, the resulting agreements apparently proved too rigid to cope with bumper crops everywhere. The accords forbid selling surplus produce within the market and call, instead, for destruction of perishable crops when prices sink to a fixed minimum level. The purpose was to protect the farmer by assuring him a reasonable income.

In 1967, France destroyed 12,000 tons of cauliflower, 10,000 tons of apples, 2,000 tons of tomatoes and 723 tons of pears. Belgium followed suit, as did The Netherlands. This year, with much more bountiful harvests, the German government has refused "on moral grounds" to be party to the destruction of fruit. Government authorities are now weighing the possibility of distilling the excess fruit into schnapps. Germany's Butterberg problem is even more serious. Nearly 30% of the profits of German farming comes from milk products. Common Market regulations allow the government to support the price of butter at the 75-cents-a-pound level. This means in effect that the dairy must buy all the milk a farmer delivers, then pass on the surplus butter to the government stockpile at the minimum price. Such assurances have made the German farmer even more attached to his cow. Fed now with enriched fodder, notably U.S. soybeans, German cows have been producing record quantities of milk in recent years.

Political and social reasons prevent the Bonn government from reducing the fixed price of milk and from forcing farmers to abandon some of their herds.

Says an exasperated official of the Bonn Ministry of Agriculture: "The only way to solve the problem is to open a hunting season on cows." The European farm surpluses will keep rising because, as French Minister of Agriculture Robert Boulin puts it, "we are entering into an era of general overproduction." There has been conversation about giving away food surpluses to needy countries. Still, all this has been more talk than action. Meanwhile, the problem of agricultural surpluses is one of the main subjects to be discussed at a Common Market meeting next month.

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