European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I hope I will not bore you Lordships by approaching this from another point of view. I declare an interest as I have for many years been a peasant farmer in France with a numéro SIREN/SIRET. I work in conjunction with other properties in the production of wine and right across the board. One of our heroes is my noble friend Lady Thatcher. She stood up for something when the Common Market agriculture policy was effectively an indirect subsidy of unrelated activities. Now we must accept that the whole objective of agriculture in France is to produce good quality food at reasonable prices. The expansion of the EU immediately brings in Bulgarian tomatoes. When I was advising the Bulgarian Government on tomatoes and quotas many years ago, I could not believe that Bulgarian tomatoes were among the best in Europe. I did not realise until I spent time in Eastern Europe the remarkable agricultural production that will come from there. I must acknowledge that I have received subsidies from the Common Market agriculture policy—although trading at a loss. One of those has been for an electric fence to keep the wild boars out. Yet there were too few wild boars, so the peasants decided they would mix them with ordinary boars. Of course, a wild boar produces only three marcassins a year and a domestic one can produce 23. So now we have a surplus of wild boar which are playing havoc with vines and others, destroying large chunks of agriculture—though hunting is important in France and Spain. When the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, speaks about qualified majority voting and joint decisions, there is not a peasant farmer in Europe who wants to see that.