Renate Kuenast, would-be farm reformer

摘要

The European Union's agriculture ministers could not quite believe what had hit them when the diminutive, spikey-haired woman from the reputedly anti-farmer German Greens first burst into their cosy club just over a year ago. Renate Kiinast was blunt, pushy and, she confessed, wholly ignorant of farming and the labyrinthine complexities of the EU'S agricultural policy. Yet she started lecturing the old hands about ways to shake up the policy, the industry and the world as they knew it. In Germany, the EU'S second-biggest agricultural producer, farmers were no less shocked. They were getting a woman minister for the first time, and a Green one, at the head of a disturbingly revamped ministry for "consumer protection, food and agriculture"-in that order. Henceforth, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder proclaimed, consumers' interests, not those of farmers, would come first. Germany's entire farm system was to be restructured. Any "howls of protest" from the powerful farming lobby would be ignored, he added. Industrial farming was out; environment-friendly farming in. Billions of D-marks in subsidies were to be redirected accordingly. Or so it was believed.