As oethers have made clear, the small family farmer is also dependent on trickle-down from the large subsidies given to big agribussiness farms to make sure their income is sustainable. Thus we are paying cast sums to support big business in order to get relatively small amounts to those we really wish to support. Redirection of the CAP support to "citta slow" type small farm production would have health, taste and environmental benefits and actually promote the sort of lifestyle the French farm lobby is trying to retain. They would end up producing possible a little less quantity but geting far more money for it.
Those large farms that depend on high mechanisation and are raping the soil would not longer get ther subsidies. Ideally this would mean that they would move away from "fake" food production (like UK farmers growing beet for processing into refined sugar thus pricing out sugar cane growers) into producing fuel crops like rape and sunflowere that could be used as biofuel. Allying this to carbon trading could well produce alternative income to replace food production subsidies.
It isn't sustainable... not anywhere. Not in Europe, not in North America... no where.
I drove across about 200 miles of some of the US's best farm country yesterday... This is the land people from Europe travelled so far to get a piece of... that was then, this is now.
A week ago or so we had HUGE rains and the fields were a disaster - gullies & wash outs.
Here in the American Midwest farms have gotten biger and bigger... where I live it is now not uncommon for a farm to be 2500 acres (10 sq km) or more and operated by one person... heavily automated and heavily in debt.
Margins are so low that even farm spouses usually work jobs in town to supplement the farm incomes. Crazy.
But Cargil & Conagra & ADM... etc., they are doing great... as are the financial institutions 'enabling' this madness.
Anyway the fields are so big that if we get a heavy rain there is little to stop all the soil from washing away... and that is what I saw for miles. The best farm land in the world is washing down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico... leaving the 'Heartland' sterile and killing the Gulf of Mexico to boot.
And if people don't think subsidies to big corporate agriculture isn't playing a role in all this... think again.
Maybe all our farmers will someday have to go back to Europe to find fertile land to work... what irony. "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." - Peter Steiner
This is right insofar as the image that the French farm lobby likes to give of itself is one associated with the "terroir" and all the goodies produced by the different French regions. But in fact the French farm lobby is... agribusiness itself, which pursues the industrialization of farming and the production of over-processed and often noxious foodstuffs. The trompe l'oeil is nowhere better on display than at the annual Agricultural Show in Paris, where that #!°##! Chirac breezes around tasting all the good things and perpetuating the myth of the small, traditional skills-based, sustainable, high-quality family farm, of which in fact there are so few left today and which the CAP as administered in France does little to support. Much more profitable, in Londonbear's well-chosen example, to produce highly-subsidized sugar beet, than more useful crops.
This said, Blair's frontal attack on the CAP, opposed to Chirac's on the rebate, is just grandstanding. This is too big a machine, it's been going on too long, and it's matched by heavy subsidies to American agricultural production. Changing it will take time and diplomacy, and, let's hope, intelligence. Making it into a casus belli is likely to be counterproductive.
