Global agriculture is on its sick bed. Millions are going hungry as supply fails to keep up with demand. Food riots from Haiti to the Philippines have led to dozens of deaths. World food aid has fallen to its lowest in 50 years. And in the European Union, the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, is undergoing a “health check”.

It is a bit unfair to portray the EU, the world’s leading food importer and exporter, as merely checking its temperature while others die of starvation. The health check was planned long ago, to see how the big reforms to the CAP of 2003 were working out. It could hardly be radically reshaped because of a sudden price spike, argue aides to Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. Indeed, prices have fallen from their recent peak and there could be a record grain harvest next year.

Photograph: Reuters

Moreover, as the Danish commissioner points out, Brussels has reacted to soaring food prices, temporarily abolishing import tariffs on grains and allowing farmers to plant on the 10 percent of land usually left fallow, or “set aside”. It has also increased the amount of milk that farmers can produce after prices of butter, milk and cheese leaped over 50 percent. Fischer Boel has now proposed making these changes permanent. 

While the big argument will probably have to wait until nearer the end of the current budget period in 2013, the health check does push the 2003 reforms further. There will be less money to subsidise production, more for diversification. Some of the more old-fashioned intervention measures, such as buying of unsold stocks, will go.

For Fischer Boel, the market is the mantra. “The health check is all about freeing our farmers to meet growing demand and respond quickly to what the market is telling them,” she said when launching it.

Yet how fast they will be asked to respond is unknown. As ever, the EU’s big powers are pulling in different directions. On the eve of the health check’s presentation, Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, reiterated London’s view that all subsidies should be abolished. If farmers cannot compete, then import the food and let them do something else.

But France believes food production is as vital to national security as its nuclear deterrent, a sort of “force de farine” to complement the “force de frappe”.

“Some [member states] consider agriculture as a declining sector and the CAP as a useless and costly policy. Others depict it as an essential activity and stress the need for a strong common policy,” observed Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, former Ital......