Friday 22 April 2016

Giles Fraser on top form.

Spotted by TBH in The Guardian:

The common agricultural policy takes from the poor and gives to the rich. Its effects can be felt in every British household, and seen in the deadly waters of the Mediterranean too.

The estate agent Carter Jonas established its reputation running the estates of the Marquess of Lincolnshire. “Some of the biggest property owners in the country are our loyal clients,” boasts its website. And, in a recent poll of these landowning clients, 67% of them said that Britain should stay in the EU.

So why all this Euro-enthusiasm in the Tory heartlands and among the landed gentry? “Should the UK vote to leave the EU, the CAP subsidies will likely be reduced,” Tim Jones, head of Carter Jonas’s rural division, explained. Thank you, Tim, for putting it so clearly. We understand.

A massive 38% of the entire 2014-20 EU budget is allocated as subsidies for European farmers. It is far and away the biggest item of euro expenditure, about €50bn a year. If these billions were being used to prop up a heavy industry – steel, for example – then the neoliberals would be up in arms, complaining like mad that if an industry can’t cope with a free market then it should be left to die. Creative destruction, they call it. But, for some reason, when it comes to agriculture, different rules apply...

5 comments:

Antisthenes said...

Those rules apply because every French president is dependent on the rural vote and the French farmer controls that. Beside they are very belligerent lot if they don't get their way. I know I have seen them in action. It is not a pretty site. I have seen riot police climb back in their buses and head off when they turn nasty. If the situation had not been so frightening I would have found it hilarious.

Bayard said...

A, also, the biggest benefactor of the agriculture subsidies are not the farmers so much as the supermarkets who can afford to buy from them at prices that would put the farmers out of business, if they weren't propped up by the government. Of course, that's not to mention their other huge subsidy, zero-rating for VAT.

Lola said...

B. It's the 'CAP is a subsidy to supermarkets' bit that the Great Unwashed and the Farmers don't get. It pisses me right off, mind.

Bayard said...

The problem is that there are no such folk as "the Farmers". On the one hand you have the small farmers, who the subsidies are there to keep going, who work long hours for little money and on the other hand you have the agribarons who are the politically influential ones who are doing very nicely out of the subsidies.
Of course, it's worse than Giles Fraser points out. You don't get subsidies for farming the land. You don't even get subsidies for owning the land. You get subsidies for owning the "entitlement" to collect the subsidy (for which you need to own land, but the reverse isn't true). Of course, there is now a market in entitlements, just as there is a market in milk quota. So, as long as you have the entitlements, you only have to do a bare minimum of actual farming and the money comes rolling in. In some places, like where I live, the entitlements, which are paid on a per hectare basis, are more than the rent. I suppose it's a way to keep the French farmers happy without creating butter mountains etc.

Mark Wadsworth (YPP) said...

B, yes agreed to all your additional points.