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