{"id":212,"date":"2008-05-21T10:54:03","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T10:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.the-finance-zone.co.uk\/uncategorized\/europes-farming-future-debated\/"},"modified":"2008-05-21T10:54:03","modified_gmt":"2008-05-21T10:54:03","slug":"europes-farming-future-debated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/2008\/05\/21\/europes-farming-future-debated\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe’s farming future debated"},"content":{"rendered":"

How should Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) respond to the “food crisis”? Our environment analyst Roger Harrabin examines how worries about food are stimulating a debate about the long-term future of the CAP.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Common Agricultural Policy – the vast system that costs Europe’s taxpayers more than \u00a330bn pounds a year – will be spruced up on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The European Commission will introduce a series of proposals aimed at making farmers more responsive to the market and distancing the CAP from the old system in which farmers were paid to produce food.<\/p>\n

The Commission wants to get rid of almost all direct payments to farmers for production.<\/p>\n

It wants to scrap controversial set-aside policies in which farmers are paid to leave land fallow; to remove quotas on producing things like milk; and to shift more farm support into a broader rural development fund.<\/p>\n

British menu<\/strong><\/p>\n

The plans will be contested on various counts, but perhaps most interesting is the debate the CAP “health check” is sparking about the next seismic CAP reform in 2013.<\/p>\n

That’s because politicians are worrying about the price and availability of food – and they’re employing those worries to support their own ideas for the CAP of the future.<\/p>\n

The UK sees the CAP as a drain on Europe’s economy and a distorting factor in world food markets. Long-term, it would like to see the CAP dramatically shrunk.<\/p>\n

The UK has been lobbying EU neighbours with the argument that with high food prices, farmers don’t need support. Ministers imply that subsidies push up world food prices – an idea that puzzles some agricultural economists.<\/p>\n

French farmers have seized the so-called food crisis, too. They argue that uncertainty over food means we should support Europe’s farmers as much as possible. Instead of liberalising trade, we should make Europe self-sufficient in food.<\/p>\n

By 2013, the current food crisis will probably have been overcome as production worldwide increases. But the debate about how Europe’s farmers should respond to a growing world population all wanting to eat like we eat in the West is unlikely to go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How should Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) respond to the “food crisis”? Our environment analyst Roger Harrabin examines how worries<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-farming","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}