Posted by dereklane on September 4, 2019, 8:26 pm, in reply to "Re: 'Cheaper food'"
That's a pretty gross over simplification. The point of the subsidies is to stabilize the market which is not the same thing as protecting it.
A mincing of words, political speak above really.
The effect is that it does indeed protect the farmer and the consumer, obviously.
It protects the farmer by allowing a yearly modest income to not change use of the land from basic grazing. Simplified but in essence this is it.
It does not protect the consumer, and saying it does doesn't make it so. If so, how.
There are all kinds of things wrong with the SFP - the largest payment, but I'm not going down that road
Why not? I suspect it's less of a rabbit hole and more of a gotcha, which is why I brought it up. It's not an irrelevancy by any means.
It gets my goat too Mack. But on this one, unless you're prepared to explain why the reasoning is wrong, you've so far done what others already have. That is, make an assertion and then tell us it's wrong, obviously. What is needed is detail. I know why sfp is problematic, I've talked on here for years about it with respect to environmental concerns (uk self sustainability) with no conflict or argument. So it is then that when the alt argument requires it to be a positive, suddenly food security, self sustainability, sensible govt directives all become a stupid idea because it leads back to the wrong faith.
The right faith in this of course is meant to be EU centric.
So, back to examples like the sfp. If you can explain why its creation and implementation had only to do with support of farmers and consumers (the latter in particular - most farmers won't want to see the end of it), and nothing to do with the manipulation of market forces (and prices), I'm listening. I don't know everything. Neither, I suspect, do most here, which is why the cheap victory shots on this issue is wearing me down. I think most began with the faith that brexit was a racist vote and the eu is for the enlightened, and shaped their political view and reasoning around that. I don't think either is true. I know most of the world exists with out an eu, and does ok. Such is colonial European thinking; believing this little pocket is the world and the only feasible solution doesn't make it so. I'd rather more discussion about the post brexit world we want rather than shutting the thought down as a version of evil Incarnate.