NORMALLY I devote some effort to a Christmas list for those in Brussels important to agriculture – however this year there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point, given the realities of Brexit. 
At the recent summit in Brussels, the cold-shouldering of Theresa May – rude no matter how important those leaders believe themselves to be – was an indication of the growing antipathy towards the UK. As we move closer to Brexit that is only going to get worse, and on that basis, no gifts are likely to sway favour with Brussels bureaucrats. 
In any event they will have less influence on UK agriculture, as we move closer to Brexit while the rest of the EU focusses on a replacement for the CAP after 2020.
A few awards would not, however, go amiss. The European Commission president, Jean Claude Juncker, deserves one for his political self-importance, and for stating the obvious. Launching plans to review the CAP in 2017, he talked grandly of a simpler and more manageable policy – exactly what every Commission president and farm commissioner has said back to when I began covering Brussels – and that was long before the MacSharry CAP reforms. 
Comments like that remind me of my Scottish grandmother who always assured me it was better to stay quiet and let people think you were stupid, than to open your mouth and leave them in no doubt.
The farm commissioner, Phil Hogan, has always been someone I like. I believe he has the best interests of agriculture at heart and understands it well. Even if the UK is long gone after Brexit, like Franz Fischler, he would be a good two term commissioner. 
However that is a long way in the future, and for now I will give him credit for one of the most pithy comments of the referendum campaign. He said farmers had a choice between the certainty of the CAP, guaranteed through the Treaty of Rome, or a gamble on the generosity of the British Treasury. That they chose the latter underlines their frustration with the CAP, but it was nonetheless a comment that will be relevant long after the vote last June.
It is certainly odd to see how everything and nothing has changed in Brussels. The UK is still part of the EU and the CAP, and will be until the day Brexit happens. As Hogan said after the referendum, farmers in the UK have exactly the same rights and responsibilities as farmers anywhere else, as long as the UK is a member. However where everything is different is that the views of the UK are no longer of much interest, despite it contributing around 15% of the CAP budget.
Involvement of UK politicians and officials is now almost an afterthought. Even in COPA, the body that represents farm unions, there is a sense that UK views are less relevant. That is ironic, given the contribution the UK farm unions have made in COPA over the years.
However, like the farm council, it will be focussed from the new year onwards on the future of the CAP – and the UK will not be part of that future, or of ambitious plans to do more to promote European food.
The politics of Brexit apart, it has been an interesting year in Brussels. The Commission managed to balance its agriculture budget, despite the many pressures on it. It has also been more successful than many believed likely in encouraging exports of farm products, helping to offset the continuing impact of Russia remaining closed.
There has been a massive push on exports, led by Phil Hogan, and the success the EU has had is a daunting prospect, given that after Brexit the UK will be competing for those same markets. It has also got through the dairy crisis – both in terms of rebalancing the market and the politics surrounding a cut in production. Some money, a bit of stalling and the market effectively solved the problem, without drastic action to cut production. This is akin to the Voltaire quotation about the ‘purpose of medicine being to amuse the patient while nature cures the disease’.
Often the same is true of politics, and the approach to the dairy crisis was a case in point – the only downside now being how to dispose of big stocks of skim milk powder in intervention, without destroying slowly recovering markets.