If I recall correctly, only 8% of CAP goes to so-called small farms.

Your last bullet - the living countryside - depends on the continued existence of these small farms. However small farms have little leverage in the bulk-buying price wars between supermarket chains. Driving supplier prices down (something that Ikea does at slash and burn intensity in another market) not only impacts small farms but it also pushes the limits of food safety regulation. Even major suppliers are cutting dangerous corners in thrall to the markets.

Two factors in the consumer mind - the invisibility of agri-Culture, and cheap food - combine to threaten the first two of your bullets.

In Finland, smaller producers are gravitating to organic farming and niche products because of the premium prices they can obtain. Good for them, but it will not solve bullet 2.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Yes, first of all an efficient cap (on individuals and companies). Subsidies should go to small farms.

However, there are so few of them left, as Sven says. So money needs to be invested in new creations of small farms. For instance, we have a local (and regional, and no doubt it goes much further) problem with the disappearance of market gardeners. They've just died out over the last twenty years (no subsidies, in France at least, for market gardening). Often they've been offered prices they'd be crazy to refuse for land that has been traditionally cultivated in this way, close to towns, and is now suburban built-up. So there has to be an active policy of setting up young market gardeners in further-out areas. Ironically, the training exists, and there are candidates. Suitable land is just really hard to come by against the competition of big farmers on the lookout for every hectare they can find. Local authorities and the Ch of Ag are, however, big enough to do something to help, and we (group of local associations) are trying to push them to do that.

For the CAP to help in this kind of problem, there would have to be a deliberate policy and some kind of incentive to stimulate Member States to apply it. Some of the money handed out to big cereal farmers, for example.

European Tribune - Comments - Cap CAP? Sustainable agri-policy

any ideas about how the agricultural sector can be supported without causing the current overproduction?

It's not an accident, it's policy-determined, at least for cereals and sugar. So first there has to be a central policy change. It should involve capping (making big-field cereals less attractive) and an end to direct subsidies on exports.

But if payments were capped (and nothing else was done), there would still be no increase in total euro payments to smaller farmers.  Big farms would just become marginally less profitable than they would be anyway due to increasing the increasing returns to scale provided by mechanization and chemical inputs (even organic chemical inputs), but they would still be more profitably than small farms.  Instead, the CAP budget for direct payments to farmers, which, I think, is a very large part of the total EU bureaucracy, would simply be reduced by 92%.(!) And that could conceivably dry out a lot of the altruistic/self-interest glue that holds the EU together.    

In policy studies, a lot of the foundations for the governance and social welfare institutions that we have can be ultimately traced to implicit compacts made in the past with farmers and landowners.  This means that efforts to increase social equity at their expense - which is what a cap on CAP payments is -- can have much wider effects on social institutions than one might initially suspect. For example, without CAP payments, large farmers and their suppliers and downstream workers, may lose a lot of interest in supporting generous wage and welfare policies and possibly the whole EU project, and we may start to see the balance of power shift decisively to the right.

As a small scale illustration, the decline of the leftist governing coalition and the Kirchners in Argentina can be largely traced to her confrontation with farmers during the commodity boom of 2007-2008.  She won the confrontation ultimately, but she neglected to consider that large farmers, which are typically conservatives who nonetheless vote left for economic reasons in critical elections and conflicts, wield votes and political power much greater than their own small numbers suggest.

Note how the problems with CAP are associated with the problems of monopoly. Attacking monopolies and oligopolies effectively would inherently bring many of the benefits that would also flow from capping the CAP, perhaps with fewer of the side-effects set forth by santiago. Small family run agricultural operations might serve better as a symbol, where they have broad sympathy, than as a spear, where they are as doomed as spears against tanks.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

... to ecosystem husbandry.

Of course, if you disqualify participation to any producer that exceeds a certain level of waste discharge,  that would automatically exclude most factory farming operation. If somehow a large farming operation can show the same measurable improvement in ecosystem health as a smaller operation, they might qualify for a husbandry payment as well.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.