Charles Clover has a piece on the fact that farming is grossly unprofitable in the UK while the retailing of the produce is highly profitable.
My instincitve reaction to any such moaning from producers is that the price system is trying to tell you something. There’s obviously too many farmers. This is slightly tempered by two things. One is the alleged monopsonist status (well, oligopsonist really) of the supermarkets and I see no problem in an investigation into the truth or not of that. Mon-opolies and -opsonies should indeed be investigated and where found dismantled. The second is that if no one farms the land at all then the landscape, created over the centuries by such, will inevitably change. That’s a slightly different question, should we try to subsidize the keeping of Britain as it is or allow it to change?
However, I can’t help feeling that the elephant in the room is being ignored. Farming is so bound up in the ludicrous stupidities of the European Union’s CAP that there are bound to be problems. Abolish that first then take a look at the other issues. We may well find that in the absence of that system that no subsidy is in fact required, as New Zealand found out when they simply abolished their entire system.
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