The origins of the CAP lie in the recognition after WW2 that Europe needed food security. That, as a region, it could not depend excessively on longdistance trade for the supply of its food.
I believe that continues to be a worthwhile policy goal for Europe (and indeed for all regions of the world). Europe should continue to supply a significant part of its own food, and the only way to do this is to arrange a cross-subsidy between, for example Jerome ;-) the absurdly over-remunerated service sector of bankers and corporate employees, and the agricultural sector (and indeed heavy industry).
The goal of a balanced national and regional economies remains a worthwhile one-- the fucking free-traders believe that somehow the whole world will kumbya-style balance out and meet its collective needs. It will never work efficiently: that is why sovereign nations have to plan their national economies in the collective interests, and why regional groups have to secure balanced economies (a mixture of agriculture, industry, and services) within themselves.
We cannot know if at some future moment of world history that rising energy costs, or some ecological disaster elsewhere, would either destroy one of the worlds breadbaskets (eg. the American, Canadian, Brazilian agroindustry) or make the supply or transport of food uneconomic or insecure.
The CAP is also about the preservation of the land in agriculture, the preservation of farming skills, and the preservation of the beauty of the landscape (such as those beautiful wheatfields in Normandie in the photograph you posted on your war memorial story)
Europe should continue to support the agricultural sector, but in a way consistent with the aims you outline above. They should cap the subsidies at a certain size of farm. They should insist on a move towards sustainable farming. They should insist on ethical, respectful and sustainable treatment of animals. They should stop subsiding industries - like sugar - which make no economic sense without the subsidies. And, on a slightly unrelated rant, if we're paying for the countryside they should insist that hikers have access to it.
If the aim is to maintain a population in rural Europe with a sensible standard of living it would probably be cheaper to simply pay them all money directly.
Don't get me wrong though: the free-market morons can take a running leap.
that's why I favour the rights of African and Third World states to impose tariff barriers to prevent the dumping of both agricultural and industrial products.
But it IS, for political reasons, one of the political foundations of the EU and the UK's insistence to dismantle it is also seen as yet another attempt to break whatever political institutions exist at the EU level, to replace with nothing. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
This was when Blair and Chirac really feel out ( the Iraq war sealed the deal on their new found mutual antipathy ).
I have never felt that the UK wants to destroy European institutions. I am not sure where people on the continent get this idea. Money is a sign of Poverty - Culture Saying
The CAP needs reforming, not busting.
