... is going to industrialise. This is not something that I think can be changed.

Not because of any virtue of factory farming - I am not a big fan of that - but because the logistics of storing, transporting and distributing the food needed to sustain a modern industrial society is itself an industrial operation. And industrial operations like to liaison with other industrial operations - they do not like small, independent (and thus unpredictable) enterprises like family farms.

So with that in mind, I think it would be fruitful to turn the question around: Instead of asking "whether CAP?" we should be asking "what rural policy?" Note that I am saying rural policy, not agricultural policy. The former is much broader than the latter.

In my view, any rural policy is constrained by the following set of objectives:

• Sustainability: Our society must be able to continue to operate well into the future.

• Biodiversity, landscape and habitat protection: The diversity of species, landscapes and habitats must be preserved. This is related to, but not quite the same as the sustainability objective. One can have a sustainable society even with radical loss of biodiversity and habitats and with a much more uniform landscape. It will, however, be a much poorer society.

• Food production: This has to be concentrated in the rural areas, for obvious reasons. This bullet also includes the health and welfare of both humans and animals employed in food production.

• Suitability for human habitation: Western^TM countries are not Stalinist dictatorships in which people are simply assigned a place to live. If the countryside cannot offer the opportunity to live a rewarding life, it will not be populated by the people needed to implement the other policy objectives. While this does not mean that the countryside must offer the same kind of amenities as the city (a futile and not very desirable goal), it very much does includes a settlement structure that allows for rail or water transport to major population centres. Before the turn of the next century, there will be no more long-distance mass transportation of goods or humans in personal automobiles. To put it bluntly, anything that isn't serviced by rail will be serviced by ox cart. This is not a matter of policy, it is a matter of geological reality.

Now, I won't claim to have a ready-made rural policy, but I think that we can draw a couple of important conclusions from this analysis:

1. Rural population will be more concentrated than it is today. Medium-density towns will replace the rustic dispersed villages (which are a logistical nightmare even today, nevermind what it'll look like without widespread access to automobiles).

2. Agriculture that depends directly on access to land for growing crops will have to be dispersed. These will have to have individual transport accommodations (literally rails going straight to the grain silo). These may be inhabited in the manner of the contemporary farm, crewed in the manner of an oil rig or some combination.

3. Agriculture that does not depend directly on access to land will be concentrated near the towns (for access to workforce, infrastructure and amenities).

4. Because Europe has the population density that it does, we will not have room to set aside isolated nature preserves, on the same scale as the North American national park system. There will probably be some sensitive habitats that will need to be strictly protected from industrial activity, but they will never be the dominant feature of the landscape.

5. It follows directly from 4) that it is imperative that the industrial agricultural production has a view to maintaining diverse flora, fauna, landscapes and habitats, and to high standards of human and animal welfare in the production. It is not obvious to me how to do that. But it is worthwhile to remember that "industrial" does not mean "enormous output" - rather, it means "predictable output." In the past century, the two have gone hand in hand, but they will not do so in the coming century (again, this is not a matter of policy, it is a matter of physical reality).

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.