Yesterday the new Polish minister for agriculture, Andrzej Lepper, made his maiden trip to Brussels to meet with the commissioner for agriculture Mariann Fischer-Boel. Lepper repeated his call for a renegotiation of Poland’s EU accession treaty, because he feels that the treaty has left Polish farmers badly off. “We don’t go back from the position that in certain respects we need to change the Accession Treaty,” Lepper said, adding: “After five years Spain renegotiated its Treaty on fisheries, Denmark on land sales, Greece on olive cultivation. This is within reach.”

It could have been a good signal that Lepper wants to renegotiate the accession treaty – since his primary area of unhappiness is the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is basically a program that seeks to transfer money from European consumers to small and inefficient French farmers.

Unfortunately, however, Lepper is not seeking to abolish the CAP, which through a competitive market would reduce food prices in Europe by 20-65 percent. On the contrary, the Polish minister said that he is “definitely closer to France than to the UK proposals [on CAP reform].”

This means that what Mr. Lepper wants is for Poland to be the new France – where inefficient and small-scale farmers are being subsidized at the expense of consumers, tax payers and the Third World.

During his meeting with the European Commission Mr. Lepper secured two small victories. Firstly, Polish farmers who are late with CAP paperwork will suffer no penalties until 15 June. They now have more time to be unproductive and fill out bureaucratic paperwork to the European Union’s largest welfare program. Indeed, every hour spent on filling out papers to the EU is an hour that the farmers are not spending on something else – such as being farmers. And EU paperwork is never simple. Hence, a lot of hours are spent on bureaucracy (one wonders if all the negative effect estimates of the CAP ever take into account the time wasted on paperwork).

The second victory is a reduced fine on Poland’s overproduction of milk. As a result more European milk will be dumped in Third World countries – thereby driving the local farmers out of budiness. Meanwhile the EU wires money to developing nations so that they can buy its products. The CAP, which amounts for close to 50 per cent of the EU budget, is among the most harmful and morally disgusting policies of the EU.