Bitter harvest (1987)

From the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Record cereal harvests in Britain and the whole Common Market were forecast at the Royal Show yesterday, foreshadowing a major budgetary headache for Brussels bureaucrats struggling desperately to keep burgeoning and costly surpluses in check.

The record. 171 million metric tons for the EEC harvest, was forecast by Mr Simon Gourlay, president of the National Farmers’ Union.

With a harvest of this size in prospect, he said, by November there would be tremendous pressure on the Brussels Commission to introduce direct measures to rationalise European cereals production at the earliest possible opportunity.

He did not speculate at Stoneleigh on what form this rationalisation might take, but today he is to have talks in Brussels on the NFU's ideas for a set-aside scheme to take excess cereal-growing land out of grain production.

(from the Daily Telegraph, 9 July 1987)