The Disappearing Peasant: Agriculture in EEC (1973)

 From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard 

So you think you’ve got problems! Undoubtedly many workers are worried about Britain’s entry into the Common Market (EEC) and the effect this may have on jobs and prices, but whatever the problems may be they will be chickenfeed compared to those which the EEC capitalists and their political representatives have had to, and will continue to, grapple with.

Although the current monetary crisis and the fallout with the United States have provided the recent headlines there can be absolutely no doubt that the biggest headache for the EEC is that of agriculture. The root cause is the existence of too many farmers producing too dearly. The various governments, especially those in France and West Germany, would love to drastically reduce the number but the snag is that the farmers have votes so governments must handle the whole affair with kid gloves.

This is why the member nations are paying these farmers inflated prices. What happens is that each year prices for most agricultural products are fixed in advance, but should the market price fall below the agreed level then national agencies step in to buy the produce at a slightly lower or “fall back” price. Of course the EEC farmers haven’t been slow to take advantage of this and the effect has been to encourage increased production which they know will be taken off their hands whether it can be sold or not.

Expensive Independence

In France alone the government had to pay its farmers £390 millions for surplus products in 1969 and the other five EEC nations had to provide them with another £115 millions from the fund which The Six have set up for such a purpose. This fund is provided out of taxation and also from the duties collected from food imports from countries outside the EEC, and this second source was one of the points which the British government was haggling over during the negotiations to join. After all, Britain is a large food importer and will have to watch all that lovely duty vanishing into the pockets of continental farmers. To aggravate matters Britain’s small but highly developed agriculture industry is unlikely to qualify for very much back from the fund so what is happening is that the nations which have rationalized their agriculture are subsidizing those which have not.

But even France’s own pay-out of £390 millions came out of taxation and since this derives mostly from industry which could be doing with the money itself for modernization to make it more competitive with, say, America and Japan, then there is a big impetus to cut this burden by getting rid of surplus farmers and their produce.

In Britain the rural population was decimated by the land enclosure of the 14th, 16th, and 18th centuries while the period of free-trade in the 19th century completed the rout by enabling cheap foreign food imports to all but ruin British agriculture. In Europe enclosures didn’t happen to anywhere near the same extent and there was no similar era of free-trade so the rural population remained extremely large. In Britain the percentage of the working population engaged in 1970 was only 3 per cent.

The situation is worsened by the tradition of inheritance. In Britain the system of primogeniture (eldest takes all) was long the rule but in France and West Germany the tendency was for the land to be divided up among all the sons. This has created smaller, more numerous farms which simply aren’t economic. In Britain the average farm in 1970 comprised 91.3 acres while in France it was 51.9, 28.9 in West Germany and only 19 in Italy, so the drive is on to consolidate the smaller farms into fewer, enlarged farms to make use of modem methods and machinery. As France’s premier, Chaban Delmas, said in 1969, “agriculture should be run competitively like an industry”.

Naturally the smaller farmers don’t like this since it will mean many of them losing their independence as owners of their own means of life. The alternative for them is to become wage-slaves and they aren’t exactly keen to sample factory life so they cling stubbornly to the land.

Even so, there is a significant decline in the numbers who live by agriculture. In 1958 about 22 per cent, of the working population of The Six lived this way but by 1970 this figure had dwindled to around 13 per cent. So the land is being cleared. This is being accomplished partly by bribing some farmers into early retirement and through a natural drift to the towns caused by the fact that despite guaranteed prices, hard work and long hours, farm incomes lag far behind those of industry.

Liquidate the Rest

But even this is not enough if farming is to cease being a drain on the pockets of the industrial capitalists of the EEC. Dr. Mansholt, recently resigned president of the EEC Commision, who recently rocked the boat by claiming in a speech at Hampton Court that the EEC had failed to improve conditions generally for the great mass of its population, produced a plan to have one in every three farmers off the land by 1980. Just how this was going to improve the conditions of the redundant one-third Dr. Mansholt didn’t say, but Professor Vedel of France proposes something even more drastic. He insists that five out of every six French farmers must retire or find other jobs. Mansholt’s plan also calls for the withdrawal of 12½ million acres from production while Vedel suggests 26 million acres be withdrawn. And yet there are still some people around who tell us that the world cannot produce enough food to feed us all!

These modern clearances are only a continuation of the process described by Marx in The Communist Manifesto when he demolished the argument that socialists wished to abolish the private property of the small peasants:

There is no need to abolish that, the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily.

And although Engels in 1894 was trying to win the support of the small peasants for the reforming French and German Social Democrats he nevertheless warned them that they were “hopelessly doomed” and that capitalist production would sweep them away “as a railway train would sweep over a push cart”.

Now that capitalism in the EEC has made up its mind to bring agriculture into line with its needs (the right food in the right quantity and at the right cost) then the remnants of small peasantry whose productivity falls far short of what industrialized farming can provide will be progressively driven from the land into the ranks of wage-slavery. This is the only possible ending to the story.

Vic Vanni

Glasgow Branch