SofteningTheBlow

AGRICULTUREUnion common rules and everything, and the environmentalconditions, without having any influence on them.’‘These [non-EU] countries in Europe haven’t joined theEuropean Union principally because their agricultural support[government subsidies] would be lower and their tariffbarriers would be lower. I mean, if you look at Switzerland,Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, all those countries have muchmuch higher agricultural support, much much higher tariffbarriers. Their agricultural communities are, general speaking,strong opponents of European Union membership.’It’s clear (below) that the NFU fears an independentgovernment would not even match EU subsidies, letalone provide greater ones following the Norwegian andSwiss example. I asked whether, ideally, iBritain wouldfollow the EFTA example. Mr Haworth was very clear:‘No, no, we don’t want that. You know, they’re heavilysubsidised. We’re not advocates of subsidisation of farmers, that’snot our issue at all. What we want is equality of treatment, sowe would actually envisage a situation where subsidisation anddirect support to farmers is phased out. We can live with that,provided it happens in our principal markets equally and acrossthe board.‘[Subsidies are] part of a process going on with theEuropean Union, which is our principle market. That’s fine, butwhat we don’t want is that in our principal market, we don’tget the same level of support as our competitors do. We’re notlooking for higher levels of support, like Switzerland, and those[EFTA] countries … [which] get quite a bit of support but facesignificantly more barriers to production than we do in terms oftopography and climate et cetera. We’re certainly not looking forthat [level of support].’· 13 ·