Crying Sheep
The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been blamed for many things. Critics say it prevents developing-world farmers from competing in European markets. It eats up state funding for important social programs, such as education and healthcare. And it strangles European competitiveness by redistributing money to unproductive sectors of the economy. Critics can ...
The European Union's (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been blamed for many things. Critics say it prevents developing-world farmers from competing in European markets. It eats up state funding for important social programs, such as education and healthcare. And it strangles European competitiveness by redistributing money to unproductive sectors of the economy. Critics can now add three more reasons to oppose the CAP: wolves, bears, and wild boars.
The European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been blamed for many things. Critics say it prevents developing-world farmers from competing in European markets. It eats up state funding for important social programs, such as education and healthcare. And it strangles European competitiveness by redistributing money to unproductive sectors of the economy. Critics can now add three more reasons to oppose the CAP: wolves, bears, and wild boars.
In 1992, Europe reformed its agricultural policy to encourage farmers not to farm larger portions of their land. (Today, the CAP mandates that 10 percent of their land lie fallow, and some farmers have taken advantage of incentives to set aside as much as 50 percent of their land.) In the same year, Brussels issued a "habitat directive" that restricted the hunting of a wide variety of species. This combination of more space and limited hunting sparked a population boom in the continent’s fiercest predators. "You can really say [the return of wolves and bears] is because of [EU] policy," says Andreas Baumueller, a policy officer at the World Wildlife Fund’s Brussels office. "Because of the EU’s habitat directive, which includes species like the brown bear and the wolf, these species have the possibility to come back to these places."
Indeed, they are returning in droves. Wolves came back to France in 1991, after a 100-year absence, and they are now killing 2,500 sheep every year. Fifteen wild boars escaped from captivity in Britain in the late 1980s and have now bred a population more than 1,000 strong in the southeast alone. London acknowledges that "without human intervention, [wild boars] could become a permanent addition to our wildlife" for the first time in almost 500 years. In Germany, the boar problem is even worse. Despite hunters’ killing more than 200,000 of them each year, the population is continuing to expand. If this growth in wildlife isn’t checked soon, Brussels may breed even more resentment among the people.
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