Jan 2010 15

Eat food: official1

If someone told you that they were in charge of a publicity campaign to encourage you to buy food, you’d probably think their boss was crazy. If they told you it was taxpayers’money, you’d probably demand a refund.

Yet thanks to an EU budget line dedicated to "Information provision and promotion measures for agricultural products", that’s precisely what we have got – and have had since the 1980s. The budget has gone up over the last decade from €17 million to €50 million, matched by funding from national taxpayers.

A Court of Auditors Report reviews expenditure from 2008 (2009/C 272/06), starting by pointing to the lack of any quantifiable basis to judge whether the expenditure is successful. To quote one evaluation referenced, "The methods used for assessing the cost–output ratio are often subjective (unreliable and probably biased) and lack rigour."

That’s hardly surprising. The money goes on "public relations, promotional or publicity actions, which must highlight the advantages of EU products, especially in terms of quality, hygiene, food safety, nutrition, labelling, animal welfare or respect for the environment." You might make a fair case for information on healthy eating, or where an industry is unjustly suffering from consumer confidence issues. But in most cases, it’s basically about removing the shopper’s unwillingness to buy certain EU products because they are less competitive, and generally because of their comparatively high cost . As such, it’s yet another hidden bill from the CAP.

There are other problems highlighted in the report. One Italian campaign in a third country had to be binned because the publicity campaign was illegal. A ‘poultry’ radio campaign seems to have abstractly wandered off topic and had nothing to do with poultrymeat.

The irony in all this is that advertising the old sizzling "Danish bacon" is illegal under EU law, just as proscriptive as the old "Made in Britain" mark. It has to be "eat bacon", or "eat Bornholm Anglen Saddleback". The first is a blanket commodity, farmers competing with other types of farmers; the latter is already beginning to be self-advertising. So why increasingly waste taxpayers’ money on it?

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  • Anthony Burnet

    All too typical of the profligate EU. Even when the origin of a given product is declared on packaging, these clowns have ensured that the wording of the “relevant” regulations is wide open to abuse: take the case of a pot of honey that I recently purchased in Tesco, the label on which helpfully informed me that the contents came from “EU and non-EU countries”. Very informative !