Saturday, May 20, 2006

Poor farmers

One unanticipated advantage of my current job is that I can now see at least some of the flaws in the rants about the state of farming that are regularly published in the press. One of my favourites is the ideas that subsidies such as those handed out by CAP produce lower food prices within the EU. In fact, subsidies have exactly the opposite effect. We pay twice to support farmers; once through the general CAP budget, and once through the elevated prices produced by the intervention system. Given our country's attitude to food price (basically, sod the animal welfare as long as its cheap) I'm surprised that this point isn't made more often.

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