Andrew Arbuckle: Chill winter ahead as we plough into the latest CAP reform round

IN A symbolic gesture, I intend removing my welly boots and rain coat from the back of the car. For this journalist it will signify that this long weary summer has slipped past and we are about to move into the meeting season.

Because farming hacks follow the working of the industry, we spend the summer at agricultural shows, farm walks and various other activities that in a season where the sun is meant to shine can be enjoyable. Like livestock, farming journalists feel good to get the sun on their back and fresh air in their lungs.

But that weather feel-good factor has not been present these past three months and it is aggravated by meeting people whose first moan (with others to follow) is about the weather.

But as I have said we are now about to move indoors and absorb words of wisdom and advice from so-called experts. Normally this is a varied diet covering a number of aspects of farm life from livestock health and welfare to the latest shenanigans and political manoeuvres.

Last year, there were a number of meetings on bovine viral diarrhoea and at least one event per week with Brian Pack espousing how he would like to see the Common Agricultural Policy develop.

(The latter was no hardship, as Pack is one of the best speakers and profound thinkers in agricultural circles. It needed someone of his charisma and ability to get the message across that big moves were afoot.)

So what kind of fare will feature this winter on the meeting calendar? Looking at the coming week’s agenda, where NFU Scotland is holding its annual council meeting and the Scottish Agricultural College are holding the second of their outlook conferences, there are two common themes. These are – and I bet you guessed them both – CAP reform and the future of food supplies.

I am sad that we can no longer compare some endless task as “like painting the Forth Rail Bridge” as the painters have now completed this work. So in future, I will write “it is like reforming the CAP” as an illustration of some extremely lengthy and seemingly unending operation.

But this may not be a good comparison, as the Forth Bridge now looks new and gleams in the sunlight whereas the end product of the CAP negotiations will be a massively messy fudge.

The proposals put forward by Dacian Ciolos, the EU agricultural commissioner, were claimed to be less bureaucratic than before, but that reflects a Brussels-based view on what is simpler rather than reality.

We are now moving into a public consultation period with the 27 member states in Europe commenting on these proposals. The outcome of this phase of the reform can only be to further expand on the specific needs and demands of every country.

While we in Scotland and the UK are currently free from national elections the same is not true elsewhere: France and Germany both have elections looming; France next April and Germany in the autumn of 2013.

These elections complicate any response to reform the CAP as all the wannabe politicians in those countries are likely to try to maximise their support through populist proposals rather than make any hard decisions. That is how politics works.

I personally cannot see there is any hope that the new CAP regime will be operational by 2014. Apart from the complexity of the whole package the politicians will have to deal with when the expanded proposals come back to Brussels, there is the issue of who holds the presidency in Europe and therefore who drives the agenda.

The presidency rotates round the member states, with Poland currently in the driving seat. They pass the baton to Denmark in January and then in the second six months of 2012, it goes to a country with a smaller population than Edinburgh: Cyprus.

Now it may be that the Cypriots have a number of experienced top politicos ready to take the various EU projects forward and keep to a timetable, but I have my doubts.

I think a great deal of responsibility for getting a CAP deal will then land on the Irish when they take over in January 2013. It would not be the first time the Irish have played a leading role in CAP – those of us with long memories will recall Ray McSharry controlling the agenda in 1992. But these are different times with more member states to be pacified and Ireland with only memories of having been a tiger economy.

So in the weeks and months ahead expect snowdrifts of thought on CAP reform, rainclouds of policy worries and thunder and lightning between politicians. I think my wellies will stay at hand in the car.