Agricultural academic

The chairman of the agriculture committee in the European Parliament had set his sights higher.

Had Romano Prodi managed to hold on to power in Italy after winning a paper-thin majority in 2006, Paolo De Castro thinks he could have fulfilled his ambition of becoming the new European commissioner for agriculture. Instead, he now has to make do with the chairmanship of the agriculture committee in the European Parliament. He says as he sits in his large office: “I have already done what I could in Italy; now I have my sights set on Europe.”

By the time he secured his current position, he had already earned a good reputation in EU circles from two stints as Italy’s agriculture minister. “He is the best agriculture minister Italy has had in recent years, an excellent diplomat and negotiator,” says Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, the former head of cabinet for Franz Fischler, the European agriculture commissioner who oversaw the passage of the Agenda 2000 reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

De Castro owes his political career to Il Professore Prodi, the economics professor from Bologna who led Italy in 1996-98 and in 2006-08, and who was the European Commission’s president in 1999-2004. Though much of his career is linked to Prodi’s, and though he claims to be an outsider – an academic whose only avowed interest is in “agriculture, agriculture, agriculture” – De Castro has proved surprisingly able to keep himself afloat in the stormy waters of the Italian centre-left, even when his mentor has slipped below the surface.

He entered the corridors of power in the Palazzo Chigi, the 16th century palace of the Italian prime minister, as a government adviser in 1996. He was promoted to the post of agriculture minister in 1998, when, in what was widely seen as an act of treason by a key ally, Massimo D’Alema replaced Prodi at the head of government. But De Castro managed to stay in Il Professore’s good books, so much so that when D’Alema himself fell from power in 2000, Prodi asked him to serve as his special adviser at the European Commission, contributing to the mid-term reform of the CAP put forward by Fischler.

In 2006, he followed Prodi again, re-capturing the agriculture portfolio, and he entered the new Partito Democratico (PD) – an amalgamation of Italy’s post-communists and left-leaning Christian democrats – as a representative of Prodi’s old party, La Margherita. But after his mentor fell from power again in 2008, De Castro realigned himself to take on the presidency of Red, a PD association closely linked to D’Alema. He developed enough of a politician’s touch to garner more than 110,000 votes as the head of the PD list in southern Italy in the European Parliament elections last June.

De Castro is himself a southerner, from the sun-blessed tip of Italy’s heel in the Apulia region. A son of farmers from Salento, he claims to “have breathed agriculture all his life”, and his brother Fabrizio still looks after olive groves and vineyards on the family’s 36-hectare farm. De Castro, his wife and two children return there each summer, but De Castro long ago moved on from his birthplace, settling in the capital of Italy’s ‘red belt’ region, Bologna. It was there in the early 1990s that he met Prodi, when both were working for a think-tank, Nomisma, from which many of Il Professore’s associates hail and which De Castro presided over in 2001-04.

He says he cut his teeth in European politics during the negotiations for Agenda 2000, first as a government adviser, then as a minister. His moment of glory came in March 1999, when an unprecedented coalition of Italy, the UK, Sweden and Denmark managed to outmanoeuvre France on CAP reform. De Castro’s main aim was to obtain a larger share of the EU’s milk quotas for Italy, in order to placate farmers who had been blockading northern Italy’s motorways in protest at the fines that the EU had imposed on them for over-production. He got his prize, doing so by turning Italian agriculture diplomacy on its head.

“The Italian permanent representation in Brussels often lacks indications from Rome over which line to take in negotiations”, explains Lorenzo Consoli, a veteran Italian EU correspondent. “So for agriculture, they had a golden rule: vote alongside France, and always against the Netherlands. De Castro changed all this, siding with Britain and taking on the French, with the help of the Danes and the Swedes.”

Fact File

Curriculum Vitae

1958: Born, San Pietro Vernotico
1982: Associate researcher in economics and agronomy, Bologna University
1996: Economic adviser to Italian prime minister and agriculture minister
1998-2000: Agriculture minister
2000-01: Special adviser to European Commission president Romano Prodi
2001-04: President of Nomisma think-tank
2006-08: Agriculture minister
2008-09: Vice-president of agriculture committe in the Senate, Rome
2009-: Chair of the European Parliament’s agriculture committee

In exchange for support for a substantial increase in milk quotas, Italy threw its weight behind its allies’ calls for liberalisation of the CAP. The so-called ‘Gang of Four’ managed to isolate Jean Glavany, France’s agriculture minister at the time, at a crucial agriculture council meeting that ended at 5am. “It was the first time that France had voted against a CAP decision,” De Castro recalls with glee, explaining how he developed his Anglo-Italian alliance from a meeting in London with his British counterpart, Nick Brown, that took place within a week of De Castro becoming a minister.

De Castro will now need to win over new friends as he prepares to steer through the new reform of the CAP, which in its current form expires in 2013: as he proudly points out, he will have real influence, since the Lisbon treaty has given the Parliament co-decision powers over agriculture.

But where will he steer the reforms? At the confirmation hearing of the former Romanian minister who took ‘his’ post in the EU executive, De Castro clearly appreciated Dacian Ciolos?’s pledge to fight for “significant resources” to be maintained for the CAP. Is this a signal, perhaps, that he is no longer on the side of cost-cutting northern Europeans who want the EU’s billions to be spent on innovation rather than on farmers?

If so, that ought not to be a surprise. After all, De Castro is a pragmatist, as he demonstrates when illustrating his position on the controversial issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). “I prefer to let the scientists talk, rather than the politicians,” he says, criticising his Green party successor at the Italian agriculture ministry, who in 2000 reversed his decision to support research on the issue. “We have to avoid an obscurantist approach,” he insists, while specifying that “this does not mean that I am in favour”. But when he claims that “the world has already taken its decision”, with governments in China, the US, Asia and Africa having already authorised GMOs, it seems clear where his instincts lie.

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