WEDNESDAY 5 DECEMBER 2007

Ms Kirsten Holm Svendsen

  Q460  Chairman: Straight abandonment?

  Ms Svendsen: Yes, unfortunately. I will mention an example. There was a big, I will not say scandal but a television broadcast where you saw a farmer who had left his pigs to die in the pigsty and you saw the trucks taking out the dead pigs. It was really terrible. There was an animal welfare issue. The farmer had not been able to survive the increasing prices of feed and he had just left everything, "I can't handle it", and he had a breakdown. The whole focus was on the animals and not on the person. That describes the political atmosphere that agriculture has to cope with in Denmark. The farmers are not very popular because they are people who just live off support and maltreat their animals, even let them die, and you can see that on television. Being a farmer is not a very good environment to live in. If you cannot survive being a very professional farmer, extending your farm to a competitive level, there is nothing much else to do. People have been educated as farmers and you cannot just switch to something else. Then you are dependent on your wife's income, because normally there is a spouse who has a job in the city or something like that, and if you cannot live off that you have to find something totally different and today you do not see many small industries. You see a little bit but that is in the farming business, like these small dairy farms producing their own cheeses of a specialised nature with shops. You can see a lot of shops connected with farms, especially organic products, but not totally different industries which is what you were asking, not yet, but we hope that will be possible.

  Q461  Lord Plumb: Is there a planning problem in Denmark? If people were willing to move out of an industrial area, for instance, would the planners object or is that not an issue?

  Ms Svendsen: No, that is not an issue. I would not say that is an issue. You are dependent on having a family living off the income and normally one of the family may be willing to move and the other one is dependent on a job in a city somewhere and that makes it very complicated to leave your security.

  Q462  Lord Cameron of Dillington: Do people retire to the country at all? That is a feature of England, everyone's ambition is to earn enough money to go and retire to the countryside.

  Ms Svendsen: No.

  Lord Plumb: In order to spend it.

  Q463  Lord Cameron of Dillington: In order to spend it, exactly, or quite often to start a small business, which is what they usually end up doing.

  Ms Svendsen: What we are seeing now is younger people with families moving out further away from the city but that is also because of increasing housing prices. You would have to do an analysis of causality. You do see people stating they want to see their families, their children, grow up in the fresh air, a green environment and stuff like that. There is a consciousness that the countryside is nice but it should not be smelly and there should not be flies.

  Lord Greaves: And not pig slurry.

  Chairman: Certainly not pig slurry!

  Q464  Earl of Arran: Has this reflected at all upon the price of agricultural land in Denmark?

  Ms Svendsen: Agricultural land is still quite expensive because if you are a professional farmer and you do have a large farm you can make a very substantial amount of money, but you also need a lot of land to be able to secure a large enough area for the manure. That is why land is still quite expensive.

  Q465  Lord Plumb: How expensive?

  Ms Svendsen: I have not got any prices with me. Maybe it does not make any sense compared to British prices. It does take quite a substantial amount of money to start up as a farmer today and it is becoming a problem for the younger farmers because they need a lot of land.

  Q466  Chairman: Can I go back to something you mentioned earlier. You say you have got a parliamentary decision basically moving away from direct support.

  Ms Svendsen: Yes.

  Q467  Chairman: And trade liberalisation is a key objective. Then you say, quite understandably, there are conditions attached to this and these conditions are fair competition effectively. How do you get there because your competitors in the world market, the argument is always they do not have the environmental costs, they do not have the animal welfare costs, they do not have other sort of costs that are put upon the European farmer? How do you deal with the issue of fair competition?

  Ms Svendsen: You are looking at me as a representative of Denmark and I do not think Denmark can deal with that and that is why we are a participant in the European Union's negotiations in the Doha Round.

  Q468  Chairman: I meant it generally, not just you individually or you as Denmark even, but we as Europe.

  Ms Svendsen: The WTO is a factor there.

  Q469  Chairman: The WTO has stuck fairly rigidly to saying, "We talk about trade liberalisation and these are other issues and they must be dealt with in another context". The WTO has been very reluctant to take that on.

  Ms Svendsen: I know they have been very reluctant but you have to take the steps you can politically. At the moment the price situation is good for liberalisation and we have seen some steps towards it from the European Community. We have been talking about intervention and we have not been able to abolish it altogether but the situation is in favour of doing this and we have now decided to spend import duties on grains. There are steps moving in the right direction. I understand what you are getting at, that we should fill up the gap where we have stricter rules on the environment and animal welfare but it is going to be very hard to point out how much that is worth in terms of support. Of course, looking at this aspect is also part of the Health Check and it is mentioned that we should look at the special conditions for European agriculture and the environment and climate also. We have to work with it but it is early days to say exactly how we are going to do that. From what I said before on Pillar II, our thoughts circle around doing something with the funds in Pillar II to solve some of these environmental problems in a different way, doing more research, innovation, getting rid of the pig smell, for instance. If you could do that, that would be very helpful.

  Q470  Viscount Ullswater: How much renewable energy are you being able to get through digesters of pig slurry and things like that? Is there any work being done in that area?

  Ms Svendsen: Yes, there is work being done but not a lot. Our main efforts on renewable energy at the moment are still in the windmill area but we are doing research.

  Q471  Viscount Ullswater: Because that might get rid of the smell as well.

  Ms Svendsen: We are trying to research in other areas to eliminate smell.

  Q472  Chairman: Perfumed slurry!

  Ms Svendsen: No. I do not think the cover-up strategy is a very good one.

  Q473  Viscount Ullswater: Just to go back to something you said earlier about the position of the Danish Government wanting to move away from Single Farm Payments, is that also the position of the farming community as well?

  Ms Svendsen: Yes.

  Q474  Viscount Ullswater: You were talking about the smaller farmers. Are they under such pressure that they have to agree with that sort of thing because it is obviously putting their livelihoods at risk?

  Ms Svendsen: The government's partner in the hearings here is the Danish Agricultural Council, which is the organisation that represents the farming community, and they are thinking along the same lines. In that sense it is fairly easy going if you talk about it politically, but there are other elements, for instance the environmental aspect and how much of the Pillar II money should we be spending on the environment and it is a lot, yes.

  Q475  Earl of Arran: If I remember right, I think you said there is only one major slaughterhouse in your country.

  Ms Svendsen: Yes.

  Q476  Viscount Ullswater: What distances, therefore, do farmers have to take their stock to this slaughterhouse?

  Ms Svendsen: Not very far. In the whole country the furthest distance is about 400 kilometres and this slaughterhouse is stuck right in the middle of the country. Depending on the prices, some farmers will take their pigs to Germany to be slaughtered and there we are straight into the issue of animal transport and transport times, which I was not really expecting to be talking about! I suppose everybody knows the Danish issues, that we have stricter rules in Denmark than in the European Union as such and it is an issue for us. That is not a Ministry of Agriculture issue, it is handled by the Ministry of Justice.

  Q477  Chairman: Can we go back to the phasing out of direct support. As you look around amongst your colleagues rather than the states, do you see any close allies on that issue?

  Ms Svendsen: Maybe not quite as liberal as Denmark, we are at the far end here but, yes, we do have allies there.

  Q478  Chairman: Who would they be? Who would you look to?

  Ms Svendsen: For instance, we would look to you.

  Q479  Chairman: Anybody else out there?

  Ms Svendsen: We would also look to the Dutch and to some of the new Member States. We would look to the Czech Republic, for instance, the Baltic States, and to a certain extent to Germany. Sweden, of course, but Sweden and Finland are in a different situation. Finland is in a support situation.