| Sicco Mansholt Profile Sicco Mansholt: From Large-Scale Farming To Sustainable Agriculture Sicco Mansholt, one of Europe's founding fathers and its foremost agricultural leader, experienced a fundamental shift in his thinking, away from large-scale farming towards a sustainable agriculture that would preserve the environment, protect rural areas and secure a fair distribution of the world's natural resources. Mansholt was born in 1908 in the Northern Netherlands, the son of politically active farmer parents. After graduating from the Colonial Agricultural College, he worked at a tea plantation in what was then the Dutch East Indies. He left after two years, shocked by the exploitation of the native farm hands. These two strains - farming and an interest in development issues - were to dominate his life. In 1945, Mansholt was appointed Minister for Agriculture in the first post-war Dutch government. In the ensuing 12 years, he concentrated on increasing the scale of agricultural production and securing a reasonable income for farmers. Mansholt, a life-long social democrat, strongly supported the idea of a federal Europe right from the start. In 1958, he became the first agricultural commissioner of the European Commission. As such, he was one of the driving forces behind a common agricultural policy that would, in his view, form the backbone of a united Europe. The first stage of European integration was accomplished in 1962 with the establishment of a free internal market and guaranteed prices for farmers. Mansholt's ground-breaking work resulted in a thorough reform of Europe's farm policy. It took many fierce battles with firmly-entrenched interest groups and several marathon sessions in Brussels, but in 1972 a Common Agricultural Policy was finally established. In the same year, Mansholt, a master of strategic planning, became President of the European Commission. Also in 1972, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, an alarming report warning of a global exhaustion of natural resources an a looming environmental disaster in the not-too-distant future. The report had a major, world-wide impact and it caused a watershed in Mansholt's thinking; he spent the rest of his life fighting against the senseless exploitation of natural resources and for a trade system that would ensure a fairer distribution of the world's riches. "Until his death [in 1995], Mansholt defended his view that the world does not belong to people, but that people belong to the world," says Professor Lolle Nauta, a close friend and a Board Member of the Mansholt Prize Foundation. "He may have died at an old age, but his ideas were timeless." Central to Mansholt's later thinking was his vision of sustainable growth in the rural areas of a federal Europe. He strongly believed that for the countryside to survive, it had to be economically thriving, with healthy, financially viable farms helping to preserve and protect nature and the environment. "Mansholt was prepared to accept the consequences of his analysis even if that meant revising his own previous policies," Professor Nauta says. "His thinking changed from economies of scale, technological progress and artificial protection of farm prices to issues such as limits to growth, environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources and North-South contrasts. His views have always had an impact, because they were based on a vision of a better society." |