Too many errors in CAP payments

In its annual report on the EU's farm accounts in 2005, the Court of Auditors 'found that CAP expenditure [€48.466 billion last year] was still affected by a material level of error which is not detected or prevented bt the supervisory and control systems.' It noted 'weak internal controls for the majority of EU expenditure, both within member states, and at the Commission, and a high incidence of errors in the underlying transactions.'

Greece was singled out as the worst offender. The Court declared that the quality of inspections in Greece was low and that the reporting of results was unreliable. Farmers' unions are responsible in Greece for inputting all data into the computer system, and can make changes whenever they want - without the changes being recorded. Not surprisingly, instances of farmers exaggerating the size of their land are not uncommon.

All of the olive oil subsidies examined in southern countries were found to contain either an overpayment and/or one of more formal errors. This led the Court to ask whether the Geographical Information System, the system of aerial photographs used to verify the existence of olive tree parcels was doing its job.

The Commission got quite humpy about the Court's findings complaining about its 'focus on finding individual errors in small smaples of transactions.' The Commission noted with apparent pride that it had clawed back €2.17 billion in ineligible payments in 2005. So that's all right then.

Gloomy prognosis on Doha Round

Recent conventional wisdom has been that the Doha Round talks will get under way once the US elections are out of the way with a window of opportunity between then and the spring. After then it would be too late to get an agreement through Congress using trade promotion authority (once known as fast track) although a few months' extension might be possible.

However, the chair of the agriculture negotiations, Crawford Falconer, has now said that he thinks the Doha Round will fail. He still thinks that both the US and the EU have room within their negotiating mandates to improve their offers on reducing farm support, but he suggested that the political will was missing on both sides. There was still the possibility of finding 'an outcome that would work and one that would make a difference', but time was running out.

Falconer's intervention could be a ploy to encourage a focus on the issues and to offset overly optimistic pronouncements by politicians. Nevertheless, it is easy to fall into the comforting belief that, as happened in the Uruguay Round, it will be 'all right on the night'. This time it may not be and the consequences for agricultural trade and further policy reform would be serious.

Green box does distort trade, claims Indian study

A report commissioned by the Indian Department of Commerce and carried out by UNCTAD's Indian team challenges the EU's argument that decoupled aid payments have only a minimal trade distorting effect. According to the researchers' model, EU farm exports would fall by a massive 45 per cent if Green Box subsidies were removed and production would fall by close to 6 per cent.

The EU, US and Canada would all see exports decline by upwards of 40 per cent in the absence of Green Box payments, while Swiss and Japanese exports would fall by over 60 per cent. However, most developing countries would see exports increase by around 20 per cent.

The Green Box issue remains open within the suspended Doha Round negotiations. However, given the EU's attachment to its decoupled Single Farm Payment system, the bulk of which falls into the Green Box, it is unlikely that any Doha Round settlement will lead to changes in the Green Box. However, there could be provision for further discussion of what can legitimately be placed in the box, putting a time bomb under the whole CAP.

Subsidy data to be made public

EU citizens in all member states should soon be able to find out who gets what in terms of farm subsidies, following a decision by Coreper. This may help to create further public pressure for CAP reform.

Ambassadors agreed 'in principle' to open national farm accounts to public scrutiny. However, the decision requires agreement from the European Parliament which hopefully can be obtained by the end of November. It remains unclear whether the Commission or member states will be responsible for publishing the subsidy data, the Commission being reluctant to take responsibility for publishing information it cannot verify.

France is continuing to demand that no subsidy disclosures are made before 2009 when the presidential elections will be safely out of the way. Jack Thuston from the transparency campaign farmsubsidy.org commented, 'It's great news that European governments are endorsing transparency. But it is quite wrong that we should be kept in the dark until 2009, as the French government is reported to be insisting upon. It now falls to elected Members of the European Parliament to stand up for the rights of those they represent. European citizens have a right to know who gets what from the EU and why. Secrecy is bad for European civil society and bad for the reputation of European institutions.'

Even if the public do become indignant at the size of the handouts given to already prosperous farmers, fundamental reform is likely to encounter continying resistance from the Commission. Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has dismissed Defra's reform document as 'incoherent' with 'a complete lack of analysis behind this paper' in an appearance before the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee. When I appeared before the committee, I argued that the paper was a strong one, but the problem was the lack of a political strategy to put it into effect.

Fischer Boel insisted, however, that many farmers would be unable to survive without the direct payments scheme and would start to abandon their land with adverse environmental consequences.

Visit farmsubsidy.org at Subsidies

Estonians to pay €35 a head sugar stockpile fine

Estonia will have to pay in full the €46 million fine imposed by the EU for stockpiling sugar in the months before accession in 2004, farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has insisted. The fine amounts to the equivalent of about €35 per person.

Estonia has contested the fine at the European Court of Justice, arguing that a large part of the sugar surplus of 91,464 tonnes have been hoarded by private households in preparation for a national frenzy of jam making. Making jam and syrup at home is a common practice in the Baltic state.

Sweden tops new CAP transparency index

On the day when the European Court of Auditors has for the twelfth year running refused sign off the European Union’s annual budget because of concerns about fraud and poor controls, farmsubsidy.org is launching a new Common Agricultural Policy transparency index. The index is based on a comprehensive scorecard that rates all member states according to whether they have released data on who gets what from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Sweden tops the index with a score of 95%, followed by Denmark (91%) and Slovenia (87%). So far twelve EU member states have released data to farmsubsidy.org.

Criticising poor controls in the EU budget, the Court of Auditors said that 'Beneficiaries — farmers, local authorities, project managers — claim more than they have the right to claim'. Most of the problems occur with payments made by member states not by Brussels, because 76% of EU payments are delegated to member states.

Jack Thurston, co-founder of farmsubsidy.org said:

'Transparency is a guard against fraud and maladministration and a way of reconnecting citizens with their governments. Transparency leads to more legimate and effective policy-making. We hope this scorecard will be used to praise the few EU member states who have embraced transparency and shame the many who continue to hide farm subsidies behind a veil of secrecy. All European citizens pay for farm subsidies, they should have a right to know who gets what - and why.'

Read the CAP Transparency Index report:
Transparency

Are CAP's natural predators awakening?

Farm subsidies campaigner Jack Thurston who runs the excellent website on farm subsidies has responded to the story below on the 'health check' on the CAP: 'As well as payment limits, the health check may also include a minimum farm size to qualify for any payments, i.e. a 'franchise'. The single farm payment has seen a big increase in the number of claimants, often it costs more for the government to administer the payments than the payments are worth. A lower limit on payments was specifically mentioned by Fischer Boel at a public meeting on 17 July 2006 in Brussels. See:

Report

Jack Thurston continues, 'It is currently not clear how the CAP health check will fit in with the review of the EU budget that is scheduled for 2009. What is certain is that we are in an era of fiscal restraint in the EU, so any new money for new projects will have to be found from within existing budgets, highlighting in sharp relief the "opportunity cost" of the CAP. The natural predators for the CAP may finally be awakening.'

Since Jack wrote these notes, Commission Fischer Boel clarified that she will not accept budget cuts to the CAP as part of the general EU budget review in 2009, but admitted that the same guarantees could not be made after 2013.

She also said that 'These are busy days in the kitchen - lots of pots are boiling at the same time. Rather than keeping the door to the kitchen sealed I have decidd at an early stage to give an impression of what is boiling under our lids.' A look at cross compliance was first of the menu, followed by the consequences of partial decoupling and the choice of model for implementing the SPS.

Hardly an inviting or daring menu and some of us would like to see the kitchen closed in its soup kitchen role for farmers.

Health check for CAP

Farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has said that what the CAP will face in 2008 is a health check, consciously avoiding the term 'mid-term review' used by her predecessor Franz Fischler. Her comments follow the recent informal meeting of farm ministers in Oulu, Finland.

One likely subject to arise will be decoupling with the ten pen cent of direct aid payments not paid in decoupled form likely to be targeted. Whether the sigle farm payment should be paid on an historical or flat-rate regional basis will also be examined. At present no EU-15 members are operating the same system and some have variations within their national borders.

The compulsory modulation rate may well rise above 5 per cent. The Commissioner is also keen on capping the amount that any individual farm would receive at €300,000. Such a move would be contentious with Britain and Germany who would claim it penalised efficiency and it is not clear that there is a legally watertight definition of a farm business. However, siphoning off money from large scale farmers and transferring them to the second pillar would create a pot of over €1 billion a year.

The future of intervention payments will also be up for examination with the possibility of it eventually being based by a private storage programme. The Commission is also talking about the abolition of dairy quotas by 2015.

Thus by the middle of the next decade be could have a CAP with very different objectives and policy instruments. It should be less market distorting, and hence WTO compatible, but it would probably leave as much money being spent on agricultural and rural policy. Reformers would thus only get partial satisfaction. They have objected to the objectives and instruments of the old style CAP but also to the opportunity cost represented by the €48 billion a year spent on it.

Co-op gets farm subsidies divi

The leading recipient of CAP direct aid in the UK in 2004 was Farmcare Ltd., the large scale farming group owned by the Co-op. It got a divi of £2.359m from CAP, down from about £2.6m in 2003. All of the top five English aid recipients were farm businesses or co-operatives, Strutt & Parker (farms) coming in second with £1.382m.

However, private landowners also feature in the list. Sir Richard Sutton's Settled Estates got £917,650.93p. Lord Rayleigh's farms got £571,808.88p. Grovesnor Farms, owned by the Duke of Westminster, reputedly one of the richest men in the UK, came 45th in the list taking £421,000.

Sugar and dairy sector companies dominated the list of non-CAP payments, accounting for all of the companies in the top ten. Sugar importers and refiners Tate and Lyle claimed a cool £125m with traders C. Cazrinkow Sugar coming in second with some £39.4m. Fairfield Foods Ireland got £18.3m while Nestlé had to be content with £5.16m. The agricultural division of multinational Cargill got a mere £1.478m.

The data revealed by Defra shows that farmers were paid a total of £1.4 billion in 2004/5. Non-farm payments totalled £431m, making the overall total over £1.84 billion.

More information on subsidies across the EU (at least for those countries that have released data) can be found at Jack Thurston's web page: Subsidies

Decoupling at risk after ECJ overturns cotton reform

A ruling from the European Court of Justice that the reformed EU cotton regime introduced in 2004 must be dismantled and replaced raises wider questions about decoupling, a centrepiece of the latest round of CAP reforms.

In the cotton regime reform the Commission decoupled 65 per cent of payments but left 35 per cent coupled which they claimed would be enough to maintain cotton production in all areas of the EU where it was important for the agricultural economy (principally Spain and Greece).

Spain, however, claimed that the reform did not provide enough subsidies to ensure that cotton production remained viable. They had a special legal argument because the maintenance of cotton production is enshrined in Spain's EU accession treaty.

The Court has required the Commission to make a fresh impact assessment. The current regime can continue until a new one is place, an outcome welcomed by the Commission which also emphasised that the basic principle of decoupling had not been challenged. Nevertheless, the ruling could re-open the issue in relation to other products where partial decoupling has been retained to protect production in [politically] sensitive areas.

It could also lead to trouble in the WTO where the 'cotton club' of Burkina Faso, Chand and Mali are upset about the collapse of the Doha Round and the prospect of better access to markets. They are considering a legal challenge over subsidies to cotton producers in rich countries. Although their principal target has been te US, any talk of recoupling payments could bring the EU into the frame.

Another tricky problem for the Commission to try and unravel.

Little change in Poland's farm structure

As Poland takes steps to reassure other member states that it is a good European, news comes from Eurostat that the modernisation of farm structures is proceeding at a snail's pace. Average farm size fell very slightly between 2002 and 2005. The average farm size in Poland was now 12.1 hectares compared with 12.2 hectares in 2002.

Some 2.67 million people are still employed in Polish agriculture, although more than half of these were family members working on a part-time basis. To qualify as a farm, an enterprise has to have an annual gross margin of €1200. By this definition there are some 1,082,700 farms in Poland. 35 per cent of farms have less than 5 hectares of farmland at their disposal, while only two per cent held more than 50 hectares. However, holdings in the latter category accounted for some 26 per cent of all Polish farmland.

Around one-fifth of farmers did not own a tractor. However, despite their small size, only 5.9 per cent of holdings engaged in any other gainful activity on farm. One would think that there was more scope for rural tourism. Meanwhile, the sums received from the EU, small though they are, are vital to the survival of such holdings. Historically, some of them were worked on a part-time basis as smallholdings by industrial workers who have now often lost their jobs in heavy industries.

Obesity subsidies for farmers?

Farmers' spokespersons have been trying hard to talk up the threat to food security from terrorists as a means of justifying the continuation of agricultural subsidies. However, the problem of obesity may give them a new basis for subsidy claims.

Australia has one of the worst obesity problems in the world and a call has been made for fruit and vegetables to receive subsidies to make prices more affordable. Research has shown that if apple prices were halved, sales would treble.

How the subsidy will be paid is yet to be decided. It does give farmers an opportunity to make use of discourses about health, although clearly some producers would benefit more than others.

Cows moo with a local accent

Cows in the south-west of England are mooing with an 'oo-arr' according to farmers in the West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers Group. They believe that their own regional accent has influenced their cows' pitch and tone who have picked up the distinctive Somerset twang. Accent shifts have also been noticed in cows in Norfolk, Lancashire, the Midland and Essex, the latter presumably having an 'Estuary' moo.

John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at University College London, provided academic confirmation: 'This phenomenon is well attested in birds. You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. This could also be true of cows.'

The farmers themselves believe that the quality time they spend with their cows has led to this distinctive accent. In the winter the West Country cows are wrapped up in cow coats and are played classical music to help them relax during milking.

Lloyd Green of Glastonbury explained, 'I spend a lot of time with my Freisians and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl. I think it works the same as with dogs - the closer a farmer's bond is with the animals, the easier it is for them to pick up on the accent.'

The link between intensive farming and human health

Zoonotic diseases that transmit from animals to humans are nothing new. Viruses have been jumping the species barrier through history, but modern industrial farming practices could increase the risk.

Given the widespread use of industrial farming in the EU, the potential for the emergence of new zoonotic diseases would appear to be high. Intensified animal production is creating a narrowing genetic base, particularly in dairy animals, poultry and pigs.

The economic imperative to make more use of high-yielding breds favours the spread of recessive genes responsible for traits such as poor immunity. According to Tony Hart, co-director of the National Centre for Zoonosis Research at the University of Liverpool, 'Livestock are highly inbred to produce maximum yield in the shortest time. This creates animals which are prone to become carriers of disease.'

Conditions on farms can promote the development of highly resistant strains of bateria, turning crowded pens into areas where there is a high risk of disease and increasing the risk of transmission to humans. There have been some positive developments such as the outright ban in January of the routine use of antibiotics in feed for growth promotion purposes.

Nevertheless, Dil Peeling, senior officer at the Eurogroup for Animal Welfare says, 'We expect to see an increase in the use of antibiotics on farms. The routine use of antibiotics may be banned. But, in the same system, animals are kept in stressful conditions that reduce immunity. In some cases, genetically they have less immunity, so we are forced to rely more on biosecurity [antibiotics] when minor diseases come up.'

According to Peeling, CAP with its historical emphasis on quantity rather than quality continues to drive harmful industrial practices. It could be argued that the reformed CAP is trying to place a great emphasis on quality, including animal welfare. Fischler was the first farm commissioner to introduce this theme into the debate, but Peeling believes that the CAP has gone backwards since then.

Certainly there is a risk of accession states learning bad lessons. 'New accession states believe that the future of agriculture must be the same as that which they have seen in Western Europe. They are not learning from old mistakes, so we're seeing funds going towards intensification,' says Peeling.

The BSE scare shook up European agriculture and contributed substantially to the public resistance to GM crops. Another crisis could reinforce demands for higher standards of animal welfare, although farmers would argue that in the interests of a level playing field there should be some tightening of standards in relation to goods imported into the EU.

Large farms benefit from direct aid

880 large farms or agri-businesses each received over €500,000 in the final year of the old pre-Single Farm Payment CAP regime according to draft Commission figures. This means that just 0.02 per cent of beneficiaries received 2.5 per cent of the total EU budget for direct aids (€700m out of €28.2 billion).

Germany once again had the largest number of farms receiving payments of over €0.5 million each, 620 farmers who received €0.5 billion between them. This is a reflection of the survival of large farms in the former East Germany.

However, France has its large farms as well. France was the largest overall recipient of direct aid in 2004, €6.9 billion, and of this €1.7 million was shared out between fewer than ten of the biggest farms.

Well over half the farms received CAP aid in 2004, just over 2.5 million, received annual aid cheques of less than €1250. Of these farms, 2.1 million were situated in either Italy, Greece or Spain. There has been speculation that these very small payments could be phased out because of the transaction costs involved in calculating and paying them. However, even very small sums can be important to marginal enterprises, e.g., where the farmer is past retirement age.

'Yo liars' claim as Doha blame game gets under way

Rookie US Trade Representative Susan Schawb has effectively accused the EU of lying as the blame game for the collapse of the Doha Round gets under way. The US has been taking a lot of the heat and no doubt the search for someone to blame makes the participants in the failed talks feel better but it does little for the future growth of the world economy or fairer trade.

Ms Schwab said that the US had so far 'refrained from responding to the finger-pointing by some' but she said the EU's claim that the US had doomed the talks by failing to show flexibility in negotiations was 'false and misleading' and made with the intention of 'attempting to divert blame for the stalemate.'

Attention is now focusing on the US farm bill due to expire next year which has provided considerable aid to large-scale farmers. Three-quarters of the subsidies have gone to growers of rice, corn, wheat, soyabeans and cotton. One idea that is being floated around Congress is to extend for one year both the current spending arrangements under the farm bill and fast-track authority.

The EU is certainly not blameless in all this as its stance was weakened by the rebellion of agrarian states led by France, leading to a relatively weak, if cleverly presented, tariff cutting offer. Emerging countries like India have also been running scared of the electoral damage that can be done by their poorer farmers.

As Susan Sechler, US director for trade and development at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (a think tank) commented, 'It used to be that first you got a deal at the WTO and then used it to discipline domestic agricultural spending. That doesn't work any more, partly because developing countries in the WTO won't accept a post-dated cheque.'

At the heart of all this is the changing economic structure of power in the world. Relations between the EU and the US have become increasingly tense over a range of issues, not just economic ones. But even if they wanted to function as a duopoly resolving their own disputes at the expense of others, they couldn't do so because too much influence has passed to the emerging countries. That is why the G7/8 is largely an irrelevance and we need a G4 of the US, EU, China and Japan, with some involvement from medium-sized powers like Brazil.

Doha Round suspended

Given that the G8 summit failed to make any substantive progress on the Doha Round, it is no surprise that its attempts to kick start the Round have failed. Negotiators were going to given up their holidays to meet a new August target date, but Pascal Lamy has just announced that the round has been suspended. He commented that some countries clearly preferred a 'Doha Light'. Certainly there are many in the United States who think that the country's interests can best be served by bilateral deals.

The suspension followed a failure to make progress in Group of Six meetings on Sunday. Four of the six G6 participants blamed the US for the collapse of the talks. EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson commented, 'If the US continues to demand dollar-for-dollar compensation for reducing domestic support, no one in the developing world will ever buy that, and the EU will not either.'

For its part the US has become increasingly frustrated by what it sees as the gutting of its proposals to cut farm tariffs which generated opposition from the EU, Japan and Switzerland. Susan Schwab, US trade representative, complained that some participants were more interested in loopholes than in market access.

The Uruguay Round was, of course, suspended in 1990 after the supposedly final talks in Brussels collapsed and was eventually revived. However, the political climate is not favourable. Mid-term elections are looming in the United States which seem to have affected President Bush's thinking. If the Democrats take either the House or the Senate, a renewal of authority to negotiate trade deals is even less likely.

The collapse of the talks is good news for heavily subsidised large-scale farmers in the US and the EU. Trade negotiations have been the most successful driver of CAP reform. Politicians in poor countries will get political points for protecting poor farmers against competitive imports. But it's bad news for agricultural exporting countries such as Australia and Brazil. And despite the celebratory noises emanating from some NGOs who argue that no deal is better than a bad deal this is not good news for farmers in least developed countries, for example cotton producers in West Africa who have been hit hard by US subsidies.

What of the WTO itself? The suspension of the Round does not mean the end of the Disputes Settlement Mechanism. Former EU commissioner and WTO head Sir Peter Sutherland commented, 'The WTO is so crucial, it will survive, but it will be damaged. The collapse of the talks leave global multilateralism in a parlous state.'

The WTO is regarded by many of its members as the last multilateral organisation by whose decisions the US agrees to be bound. In truth this is another victory for US unilateralism and any bilateral deals that are forged in the future will benefit the US more than the other participant. As Michael Cox of LSE warned in the March issue of European Political Science, the bridge across the Atlantic can no longer bear any heavy traffic and there is a widening gulf on issues and values between the EU and the United States. As an Atlanticist, this is something I regret, but it is difficult to see what remedies there are to hand.

Rising grain prices may push up cost of bread

Record summer temperatures, low global grain stocks and the expected growth in biofuels, have seen wheat prices rise to ten year highs and may lead to big increases in the cost of bread and pasta. Corn [maize] and barley prices are also likely to raise which may affect the cost of beer and breakfast cereals. For the fifth year in six global production is expected to fall short of demand. Hedge funds have been active in wheat futures, with a sharp increase in the number of contracts bought in the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe.

Both the US and Northern Europe have experienced record temperatures, which some see as evidence of the reality of global warming. Some wheat farmers in the UK are harvesting a month early for the first time since the 1979 heatwave. In Northern Italy, the hot, dry weather is estimated to have caused €100 of damage to crops with yields forecast to fall by 9 per cent.

Ethanol plants using wheat as an ingredient will open in Europe in the next two years. Christopher Brodie, a partner at hedge fund Krom River, commented, 'Once the ethanol plants open, we will link the price of petrol to the price of bread, because the price of wheat will be settled by who pays more, the oil industry or the food industry.'

Shroud wavers among the farming community will no doubt see these developments as supportive of their food security arguments for continuing subsidies. Alternatively, one could see it as market forces of supply and demand generating a better rate of compensation for farmers, ultimately leading, if the trends are sustained, to a rise in supply.

In the land of fresh rice ears of many autumns

I recently returned from my first visit to Japan, a country about which I have read extensively over the years. It was therefore no surprise to see paddy fields located in the middle of the urban sprawl of the Osaka area, one of them being tended by a presumably part-time farmer. Japan, I was told, has something like 2.2 times the population of the UK but half the useable land area. In the area where I spent most of my time, Fukuoka prefecture, there was more emphasis on value added niche crops like strawberries.

In the 8th century Nihon shoki [Chronicle of Japan] there is a famous passage that refers to Japan as 'the land of fresh rice ears of fifteen hundred autumns.' This is seen as example of the deep roots of agriculture among the Japanese. A former PhD student, now teaching in Japan, had negotiated with a farmer to obtain a supply of brown rice in return for helping with the planting.

Rice production in Japan and the Republic of Korea remains highly protected. Although the high tariff barriers will have to be reduced, I have some sympathy with demands to maintain them on cultural grounds. Japan is a unique blend of tradition and modernity and certainly the most distinctive place I have ever visited (and that includes remote ethnic minority areas of China).

There is an inconsistency in calling for the maintenance of some protection in Japan and pressing for its elimination in France. In both cases the attachment to a particular form of agriculture might seem to be sentimental, even though both countries have distinctive and much admired food cultures. I would maintain that the French way of life is less tied up with a particular pattern of agriculture than is often believed, particularly given that many French farms are large scale. But perhaps I feel an affinity with another island kingdom that I do not feel with France, a country I have never visited.

UK farmers slow to respond to reform

A survey of farmers carried out by HSBC Bank shows that most farmers are aware of the need to adapt their businesses as production support declines, but few have a clear vision of how to achieve this.

The survey found that 64 per cent of farmers have done the calculations to find the level of their likely Single Farm Payment over the next three to five years. However, 87 per cent of the sample intended to either maintain their set aside at the same rate as last year or ro reduce it, indicating that the cropped area for the 2007 harvest is likely to remain at a similar level to that of recent years. Surprisingly, only 52 per cent of the farmers questioned know the cost of producing a tonne of wheat on their units which is the key of basic information that one would think that any business needed to make commercial decisions.

Few farmers are planning ahaead to replace the state support or reduce their costs in line with its withdrawal. Stuart Ellwood, head of agriculture at HSBC, is surprised that the rate of change is not faster and is urging producers to move away from the traditional cropping patterns dictated by CAP payments to growing for other food and feed markets, and alternative land uses such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals and textiles.