EU Common Agricultural Policy

It seems as though the EU might have finally woken up to the damage it is causing to the global marketplace and all of us who live in it with their grossly distorting program of farming subsidies.

The biggest part of the EU budget, by a huge margin, is paying farmers truckloads of money in return for basketfuls of produce. Or in some cases – no produce at all. Farmers are often encouraged to produce nothing at all, and WE pay them to do that. This encourages the worst sort of behaviour in the farming sectors around the EU. Food is produced that is not necessarily needed, farming units are kept at a traditional micro level allowing no economies of scale in the production processes and consumption of chemicals and other resources, and farm produce prices are distorted away from what the market actually thinks the food is worth.

The farmers themselves believe that they have a right to be paid for their mere existence. They have to be shaken off this junket that the EU has created for them. If they want to maintain their traditional lifestyles, they can do it on their own time and money, not on ours, thank you very much.

And sad to say, but this policy of subsidies does not only lead to inefficient behaviour in the agricultural sector alone. It takes a whole industry to support it as well. We the taxpayers need to be taxed, with no valid justification, administration processes need to be maintained, all wastefully manned by large numbers of paper shuffling bureaucrats and payments systems must be run to ensure that the right farmers get their free lunch on time. For woe betide the rest of the population if any farmer feels he has not received the full deserts he believes he is entitled to when he is entitled to them. Immediately we see fleets of tractors polluting the main streets of our cities, choking the very economies that are funding their lifestyles. They obviously have nothing better to do with their time as we are paying them not to produce anything, and for those that still produce something, their pocket sized farms only take a few days effort per month to run.

This program of subsidising the lifestyles of an inefficient farming sector has a number of very significant impacts around the world. The sooner we can reduce these areas of impact, the better the global population will be.

Because of the subsidies that farmers in Europe receive, the market price of a bag of potatoes produced, for example, in France is cheaper than a bag produced anywhere in the developing world. And since the EU produces too much food, this bag of potatoes lands in the shops in the developing world, whether as aid or trade, and costs less than the local produce.

For a start the bag of potatoes has consumed a huge amount of resources in its inefficient production, and it is burdened with the cost of running the administration system that funds the lifestyle, next it consumes more of our dwindling supply of fossil fuels to get to the developing world. And finally because the farmers in the developing world cannot compete with the incoming artificially cheap subsidised produce, they walk off the land. This increases the social burdens on the governments in the developing world, burdens they could well do without as they have not caused the problem. It also reduces the abilities of those countries to feed themselves, and thus it actually makes them even more dependant on the charity of the donor governments of the developed world.

And now we have a global food crisis. I wonder who is to blame. Perhaps the developing world for not keeping their farmers on the land? Maybe not.

If the EU can finally get rid of this millstone around the necks of both the EU taxpayers and the developing world’s farmers, we might make some progress.

And then, maybe the USA might see the light and start getting rid of their huge agricultural subsidies program as well. But no, one miracle per century is all we can expect. The USA will never let anything outside its borders change what it does in its own economy.

Tags: agricultural subsidies, developing world, economies of scale, EU budget, EU common agricultural policy, farming subsidies, food prices, fossil fuel, global food crisis, global marketplace, inefficient farming, market price, micro farming, paid to produce nothing, taxpayer