I had my ear bent earlier this week by those nice people from seed breeder Nickerson, concerned that warnings I'd fired off in a previous blog about French subsidies to pea and bean growers could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In my blog I'd suggested that "the new subsidy amounts to a massive distortion of competition, based on spurious environmental grounds, designed to lever French producers into key export markets, while artificially boosting the area of protein crops grown" .
OK, so it was a little over-the-top, though I was amused to see that Nickerson has used the quote in their presentation to the seed trade earlier in the day.
Anyway, the message that Nickerson - which supplies over half the UK's pea and bean area - wanted to put across was that this was all a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
Their analysis suggested that, for peas at any rate, British and French growers were operating in totally different markets, with French producing mainly for animal feed and the Brits growing for human consumption....
On beans too, Nickerson believes that the £30/t subsidy available for French growers will have little impact on the UK, as our quality is superior for the all-important Egyptian market. Furthermore, the French claim the subsidy will only be paid on beans going to their domestic feed industry, and not for exports.
Of course, I go along with most of this and I'm sure British growers will continue growing peas and beans, both for the benefits they bring to the arable rotation and the money they can make, with or without subsidy.
But I still maintain there is an important point of principle at play here, and the fact the French are allowed to pay what are clearly production-linked subsidies, to make it more profitable for their farmers to grow peas and beans, runs counter to the whole spirit of the single market.
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