Starving Africans show that the Common Agricultural Policy is a lousy justification for EU membership.

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Second fundamental: the Common Agricultural Policy is a sophisticated mechanism for making sure we don’t starve. Scarcity causes disputes and without food security, peace would be impossible: people do nearly anything if they are hungry enough. Europe’s complex network of subsidies means that when a harvest fails at one end of the continent no one starves because we have slack in the system and the only ‘crisis’ to speak of involves pricing. Europe subsidises its food production, which makes it more expensive than food in most of the rest of the world, but – guess what? – we can afford our expensive food due to the prosperity that our long-term political stability has given us. Moreover the percentage of our income spent on food is diminishing.

People don't buy this crap do they? The CAP makes food more expensive and, to cap it all, means that we make a major contribution to killing folk in Africa who might want to compete with our expensive and inefficient farmers. Using the CAP as a justification for EU membership is an exercise in masochism - all the CAP means is higher food prices and more poverty in developing countries.

...

...on agricultural subsidy

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OK, this is from the States but could easily be describing the Common Agricultural Policy. Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and - along with her students - has become perhaps the first human to read the US government's farm bill.

And the professor said this:

Well, it's so astonishingly irrational it just takes your breath away.

That's right, this monument to Roosevelt's interventionist politics has become - by a process of renewal and incremental addition - something like this:
 

I opened up the file that was on the Internet and the table of contents was 14 pages long. The entire thing was 663 pages and it's totally incomprehensible.

This my friends is the evil progeny of bureaucratic inertia and the political favour - like the thing that Quatermass found in the pit, it keeps growing, sucking in politicians, fed off by special interests and protected by the system. All we can do is amend - we cannot kill the beast.

And the beast does this: 
 

Some things are so completely irrational they just take your breath away. For example, if a commodity producer decides to grow vegetables, that producer will either lose all of the subsidies he's getting or will have to plow the vegetables under. They are required by the way this law works to plow them under, treat them with Roundup and kill them, or let them freeze. But they're not allowed to actually grow and sell them.

 Perhaps we should remind ourselves what PJ O'Rourke had to say about the farm bill:

I spent two and a half years examining the American political process. All that time I was looking for a straightforward issue. But everything I investigated — election campaigns, the budget, lawmaking, the court system, bureaucracy, social policy — turned out to be more complicated than I had thought. There were always angles I hadn't considered, aspects I hadn't weighed, complexities I'd never dreamed of. Until I got to agriculture. Here at last is a simple problem with a simple solution. Drag the omnibus farm bill behind the barn, and kill it with an ax.

Agricultural subsidy fails to protect agriculture, doesn't keep farmers on the mad, makes food more expensive for ordinary folk, leads to corruption and means Africans starve to death.

Can we just stop it please?

....

Tim Farron or "Some so-called liberals really don't get it do they?"

Tim Farron, who I believe holds some elevated position in the Liberal Democrat Party and represents South Lakeland at Westminster is prattling on about needed "fair trade" for upland farmers.

I see farmers who struggle to keep going and just to pass on the farm to their children. It really is high time we give farmers a fair deal. I am doing all I can to make sure that their concerns are heard. We need a strong supermarket regulator as soon as possible and we need to provide fair trade for British farmers.

Let's be clear, Mr Farron is right when he says farmers struggle, work daft hours in all weathers and are often living below the poverty line. And that often the price they get for their produce barely represents the cost of production. But his solution - regulating prices - is wrong.

Let's begin with subsidy. The Common Agricultural Policy dishes out 55 billion Euros in farm subsidy. So why then Tim are your upland farmers below the poverty line?

Each year we’re seeing a further concentration of benefits in the hands of fewer,
larger landowners, who seem to use their subsidy cheques to buy up more land and more subsidy ­entitlements,” Jack Thurston, the co-founder of farmsubsidy.org, told the Scotsman. “Most people think farm subsidies are there to help the small guy but we’re seeing it’s quite the reverse. The bigger you are, the better your land, the more public aid you get,” he said.

So there you have it, Tim. Billions in subsidy to farmers is being scooped up by landowners leaving tenant farmers and upland farmers with less income. And you want to blame supermarkets? Are you so in love with the EU that you can’t see how its corrupt subsidy system is the problem and that more regulation, more price controls will serve only to distort the system even further?

Let’s look at what happened in New Zealand where there was a similar situation with plenty of upland sheep and cattle farmers a long way from the market. And there was a distorting subsidy system. In the 1980s the Government scrapped the subsidy. And all the farms closed? No.

New Zealand agriculture is profitable without subsidies, and that means more people staying in the business. Alone among developed countries of the world, New Zealand has virtually the same percentage of its population employed in agriculture today as it did 30 years ago, and the same number of people living in rural areas as it did in 1920.

Indeed if you read on Tim, you’ll find that sheep farmers – you know the chaps who come to your surgeries – were hardly affected at all by the changes:

Sheep farmers, who as a group were the most heavily subsidized, were (not surprisingly) hardest hit by the elimination of subsidies. Those farmers who were heavily in debt at the start of the reform period were hit hard by rising interest rates, and a transition program was negotiated to ease their situation. Farm-related sectors like packing and processing, equipment and chemical supply, and off-farm transport also suffered, but this was regarded as evidence of their previous inefficiency. Overall the ‘transition period’ lasted about six years, with land values, commodity prices, and farm profitability indices stabilizing or rising steadily by 1990.

If you were a real liberal, Tim – one who believed in free markets allowed to operate freely – you’d be campaigning for us to scrap agricultural subsidy so as to allow farming to thrive. Instead, like a good social democrat sucking at the taxpayers teat, you call for more regulation, more price controls and more taxpayers money directed to special interest groups.

....

Local food - yes please. Agricultural protection - No thanks

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P. J. O’Rourke in his attempt to explain the US Government, “Parliament of Whores”, took a look at agricultural policy. This was his conclusion:

“I spent two and a half years examining the American political process. All that time I was looking for a straightforward issue. But everything I investigated – election campaigns, the budget, lawmaking, the court system, bureaucracy, social policy – turned out to be more complicated than I had thought. There were always angles I hadn’t considered, aspects I hadn’t weighed, complexities I’d never dreamed of. Until I got to agriculture. Here at last is a simple problem with a simple solution. Drag the omnibus farm bill behind the barn, and kill it with an ax.”

We’re no better over here. In fact we’re worse. We’ve created a pseudo-moral stance to justify tariffs, import quotas, intervention prices and all the panoply of agricultural protection. A parallel “rural development” industry that talks of local food, area protection, origin protection, sustainable this, and low carbon the other. And this industry cuddles up to those of us who like good, fresh produce and pretend that the only way we (middle class foodies) can get this lovely local produce is to support anti-trade, anti-business measures that destroy value and jobs.

I’m no fan of supermarkets – that privileged bunch of businesses enjoying the largess of a lenient property tax system. And I think we should do more for town centres – like having free parking and lower business rates, for example. But I do not believe that extending the inefficient protectionist measures of the Common Agriculture Policy or having a further raft of protections for food processes will do anything to improve access to local food.

So no I don't want national "food security" strategies, bans on air freight, restrictions of lorry movements or all the various protectionist measures dreamed up by the "rural development" industry. I just want good fresh produce - and will have it because I'm prepared to pay more for it. Simples.

I’m with PJ on this – agricultural protection serves farmers poorly, provides no real security, is corrupt and leads to expensive food. Kill it. And while we’re about this we can kill the “rural development” industry too.

...

We need free trade in food not "food security" to feed the world

Today the Government released its "food security" strategy with much hurrah. Hilary Benn - MP for one of the UK's least rural constituencies, Leeds Central - made much noise about the environment, buying British and unspecified "threats" to food supplies. And favoured academics like Professor Tim Lang popped up on the TV and radio to lecture us about our eating habits, the environment and food safety.

But nobody challenges the Government's facts or asks about the real problem - it's a given that we need to grow more of our own food. That farming subsidies are benign. And that agricultural protection is important because of food security. We wouldn't want to depend on all those nasty foreigners for our food now would we?

At the same time the "food security" strategy frightens us by describing how a vastly increased world population will - like locusts - devour everything. So we stop them by not importing or exporting food? That's going to help!

I have a suggestion Hilary - the world produces enough food to feed current populations and, if we stop trying to grow petrol as well, we can feed a substantially bigger population. But only if we improve the distribution of food across the world. To do this we use a well tried and efficient mechanism call free trade. So scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, remove the immoral trade barriers preventing third world producers from accessing western markets and stop dumping our surpluses on developing markets and in doing so destroying those markets.

And while you're at it Hilary stop the food safety fascists trying to stop artisan food production in England - when did someone last die from eating cheese made from unpasteurised milk? Why can't the farmer slaughter his own meat? And when are you going to stop supermarkets aggressively forcing low quality standards and homogenisation on small producers?