Not seeing the wood for the trees

Much more frequently than used to be the case, the positions taken up by our politicians and civil servants – whether at the level of national Government or EU – leaves us in a situation where we are engaged in two policies that are are often in direct conflict with each other. I will give you a recent example of this. 

The buzzword assiduously introduced into the agri conversation by the present EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Christophe Hansen, is ‘simplification’. This, apparently, means that the days of head-wrecking complex interactions and form-filling in farmer dealings with the EU are to end and, henceforth, deliberate efforts will be made to strip decades of duplication and pointless ‘admin’ out of the system. The long sigh of relief that will have escaped everyone’s lips on hearing that announcement turned out to be very premature. In the kind of EU ‘about face’ that is as irritating as it is predictable, farmers learned that deforestation regulations planned for introduction year end will proceed.

Regulation

The EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) comprises a whole new system of administration and form-filling that will effectively duplicate BISS. So, if they are based on the same information that farmers must submit as part of their BISS, why doesn’t the Commission go into their own systems and extract the info that’s already there for the purposes of their new regulation? That’s a very good question and it’s one that ICMSA has been asking since we first heard about the regulation and what it would involve.

Why are farmers being asked to effectively give the same information twice? The deafening silence that is all we’ve heard by way of response to our question is very revealing. Goodness, the drive to ‘simplification’ didn’t last very long there, did it, Commissioner Hansen?

So we’ve ended up with the hard-to-imagine scenario that has the EU Commission on a drive to ‘simplify’ farmer engagement with the EU while at exactly the same time, demanding that those same farmers now complete a whole new report that pretty much covers exactly the same areas and information as they are already submitting for BISS. Does that sound like ‘simplification’ to you?

Contradiction

But the counterpoint and seeming contradictions that we highlighted in our opening sentences don’t end there. Remember now that the EUDR is designed to measure and work against any notable lessening of the amount of woodland – natural or planted – globally. That was the whole point; forests are the ‘lungs of the world’ as those environmental ‘activists’ always tell us via the radio and television programmes that they regularly appear on..

If forests are indeed the ‘lungs of the world’ then maybe – when ICMSA asked again about the new regulation – it wasn’t the best time to send a team of officials over to the Commission’s offices in Dublin to answer questions about the insane idea that is the Mercosur Trade Agreement? Whether Mercosur is the answer to the Trumpian disdain for ordered international trade agreements is, for our purposes, irrelevant. No-one, not even the most one-eyed supporter of the Mercosur agreement will disagree that it will have disastrous results for the levels of deforestation that already occurs in the Mercosur states of South America. The calculation of the Commission, and particularly the hard-pressed German car exports sector, is that we (the EU) will sell them (Mercosur countries) engineering, tech, financial services, communications and construction and what will they (Mercosur) be selling us?
The answer is, beef. But the production of South American beef is directly related to the amount of land that has been cleared of forest.

So we are left with a situation whereby the EU Commission is foisting deforestation regulations on its own farmers in contravention of its own supposed ‘simplification’ drive and because of the existential threat to environmental sustainability that deforestation offers. Simultaneously, it is pushing for a trade agreement with the Mercosur states that is predicated absolutely on massive imports to the EU of beef that can only be produced on land that was until recently – or is still just about – virgin forest.

Now, do you see what we mean when we say that far, far too often we in Ireland and the broader EU end up operating policies that are not alone not integrated but actually in direct conflict with each other?