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A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (Now with poll!) | 37 comments (37 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (4.00 / 2)
Of course there is a progressive critique of the CAP, aiming at capping the subsidy per farm/family, and asking that it turns its emphasis from promoting industrial methods and objectives to more sustainable ones - the one problem being that farmers don't want to become glorified gardeners maintaining the countryside with subsidies.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Mon Jun 22nd, 2009 at 11:08:32 AM EST
Re: A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (none / 1)
Those farmers I know don't have a problem with the move from quota based production targets to direct subvention and are also quite happy to comply with habitat directives, REPS - Rural Environment Protection Scheme and other measures.  Their problem is they can't cover their costs at current prices.

notes from no w here
by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Mon Jun 22nd, 2009 at 11:27:18 AM EST
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Re: A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (4.00 / 2)
Guess time:

I'll bet many, if not all, of these farmers are locked into commodity production and do not sell their product(s) directly to consumers.  I'll further bet these farmers haven't heard of producer/consumer co-ops either.

Until farmers capture the consumer dollar they will remain ill-payed for their work while watching the middlemen and grocery/food stores reap the majority of the profits.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Mon Jun 22nd, 2009 at 11:51:46 PM EST
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Re: A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (4.00 / 2)
The irish cooperative movement has been a huge part of Irish farming history with most farmers selling to cooperatives acting as primary processors and food marketeers.  However over the years the professionalism of the co-ops combined with the consolidation mandated by the economies of scale have rendered these businesses only marginally different from commercial businesses, albeit with significant farmer shareholdings.  

EU regulations on pasteurisation, sterility, and the equipment required - often ludicrously prescriptive - also makes it almost impossible for individual farmers to raise the capital required for even small scale craft production.  The increasing dominance of the retail market by global supermarket chains also cuts off direct access to the vast majority of consumers.  Farmer's markets exist but they operate on the margins.

There are many regulatory, technological, capital, and economic barriers to direct market entry and it is very difficult for many farmers to survive without being caught in the corporately dominated supply chain.

notes from no w here

by Frank Schnittger (mail Frankschnittger at hot male dotty communists) on Tue Jun 23rd, 2009 at 06:45:10 AM EST
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Re: A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (none / 1)
linca:
the one problem being that farmers don't want to become glorified gardeners maintaining the countryside with subsidies.

why not? sure beats abusing the land by stripmining its value at the cost of future fertility, polluting water tables and reducing humus, not to mention having to deal, (or more likely pay immigrants to), with incredibly dodgy chemicals.

you argue your corner brilliantly, imo, Frank, definitely seeing the big picture.

also, i don't feel it to be bad netiquette to transport an interesting dialogue, au contraire, that's one of the things it's for...

multi-kudos for focussing on what's real, and will continue to be long after much of what we see around us is gone. CAP money should stop going to big ag and gentry estates and be used as skillful social engineering to guarantee against the mass exodus of country people to already overloaded towns, the toxification of the environment, and insurance against over-reliance on heavy-footprinted imports.

it makes no sense that kenya's main export is roses, when many of its people are hungry, we in the EU need to be very careful about importing such sundries.

as more and more people are laid off from industry, the issues of food and where it comes from will come ever more to the forefront of public affairs.

i'm sure glad you're putting out sound ideas into the forums about these serious issues, there's a lot of education to do.

reclaiming fields on my land, on which farming had been abandoned for 80 years, is enough of a gruelling job, even with heavy machinery. it has given me incredible respect for the work our ancestors put in creating them, and keeping the woods from taking them over, without CAP, these local farms would have been long subsumed, surrounded by ghost villages, as is happening in other parts of italy.

don't abolish it, make it sustainably fairer...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Jun 23rd, 2009 at 05:21:37 PM EST
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A Sustainable Food Industry for Europe (Now with poll!) | 37 comments (37 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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