eternumviti
Insufficient privileges to reply.
Other opinions do indeed abound, and I've already explained at length, and more than once, why I brought it up.
You have this way of breezily dismissing points that I have made by quoting a few facts and figures, whilst completely sidelining or ignoring my points.
The CAP dates from the earliest days of the EEC, and it's origins lie in France demanding it as a payoff for accepting tariff-free German manufactured goods. Its aims, as with much EEC/EU rhetoric, were noble enough - food security, protection of rural livelihoods and easy prices for the consumer. In its first 3 decades it supported farmers by subsidising modernisation, intervention buying and high external tariff walls. The effect was to increase the pace of the transfer of labour to capital, create massive overproduction, and cut off the European market to 3rd country producers. The resulting food mountains were often dumped onto external countries, further pauperising their own producers - powdered milk was a particularly notorious example - and enriching middlemen. Farmers were paid to grub up woods and hedges, drain marshland and pipe ditches and drainage channels, destroying thousands upon thousands of hectares of irreplaceable habitat, and the chemical pesticide, herbicide and fertiliser industry employed the agronomists who directly advised farmers. The resulting environmental carnage created virtually barren prairies, destroyed soil structure, created toxic runoff into rivers and seas, and has been blamed for the high incidence of cancers amongst agricultural workers.
Following the Uruguay GATT round between, I think, about 86 and 93, during which the Australian and Kiwi Cairns group succeeded in getting the EU's punitive external tarrif and high intervention subsidies reduced, the system of production subsidy was halted, and the policy turned to area payments incumbent upon increasing degrees, through CAP reforms, of environmental improvement, with greater subsidiarity to the member countries. However this system continued to favour area payments, massively advantaging big landowners. This was supplemented by so-called Pillar 2 Rural Development Schemes, which helped farmers diversify by giving, for example, payments to convert redundant buildings to rural business and holiday lets, or, as in the case of one of my own suppliers, convert a former dairy farm in Dorset into vineyard. However, the single farm Pillar 1 area payment remained, and remains, the largest subsidy.
In the latest CAP round, which came into effect a short while ago, the SFP has been supplemented by a greater qualification requirement to address environmental and greening incentives, though the degree to which this is having a positive effect is shown to be very limited. Many farmers were, in 2020, claiming greening cash that they already qualified for prior to the incentives, and farm checks run to about 1% of claimants. It is pretty much business as usual.
My own sister, who I love dearly, and her husband, farm around 1800 acres of arable land in Essex. In 2019 their total payments ran to a cool £160,000. In 2020, the final year of EU derived subsidy, this increased to £225,000 due largely to greening incentives. For 10 years they ran the farm organically, and when they reverted to conventional farming they continued to plant hedges and trees, maintain wide field boundaries - initially under the Countryside Stewardship Scheme - and to use composted recycled Garden waste, and, dare I say, well-rotted human waste (Thames Water is a major supplier) to fertilise and improve soil structure, so they essentially already qualified for greening payments despite having not previously received them, at least in their current form.
Their lifestyle is, in summary, a great deal better than that of your average Cumbrian or Auvergne Hill farmer.
The CAP remains inefficient, massively bureaucratic, wasteful, and somewhat directionless, and the degree to which it places the gaping maw of capital over both the environment and labour, highly controversial at best.
And even when this country was still in the EU, you, and I, and Steve, f1diddlededee, TonyL and TheDecameron had absolutely no say in the laws that created and maintained it, and no sanction over the unelected officials responsible for it. Zilch. Jackshite. Sweet Fanny Adams.
