Have the Green's hacked your account :scratchhead:
I was wondering as much :rolleyes2:
I think subsidies are quite like a phrase I once heard used to describe the USA. A good concept that has got out of hand.
The purpose of subsidies at inception was two fold. Help with food security for a starving European population in the aftermath of WW2, and absorb price shocks in the market to Insulate the farmer.
These days, the market has seemed to settle a bit more, less ups and downs (arguably more downs). Thanks to modern farming techniques, there is an abundance of food.
Subsidies now have got to the stage where goodman not only dictates beef price, but he has a large enough supply of his own to regulate the market to his liking, and picks up the largest subsidies of any farmer in Ireland.
At the other end of the scale, there is the armchair farmer as he is referred to on here, who farms mainly to collect the subsidies.
We've gone too far down the route of subsidies to get rid of them completely and all of a shot. The idea would he that if the subsidies were removed, the price of our product would increase to a level where our income would be the same as that of when we were getting the subsidies... Fat chance of that happening.
As bogman has suggested (albeit maybe sarcastically), id say in the next few years there will be a move towards subsidies being paid on environmental impact rather than production, as has been touted as the replacement for CAP in the UK Post brexit (if it ever happens)