Agriculture

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most important factors affecting farming in the EU. Everything depends on it.

The initial aims of CAP were:

  • To increase productivity and to achieve self-sufficiency
  • To give all farmworkers a fair standard of living
  • To keep prices of agricultural products stable
  • To maintain food supplies
  • To ensure fair prices for customers.

Farming in the UK was improving for many years. Nowadays we have new, large, more powerful machinery, big fields, chemical fertilisers etc.

As we have much bigger fields, we need bigger machinery. This increased profit margins by allowing a greater scale of mechanization. E.g. farmer who has big wheat fields need big combines to gather in the harvest.

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One of the first aims of CAP was to increase food production so that the EU became more self-sufficient in foodstuffs.

There were introduced along side support policy to increase outputs. So, if there is a shortage of any product, CAP invested money on this product to increase amount of it. Farmers were paid for grow this product. But when there was sufficient amount of it the subsidies were removed. E.g. in 1993 there was a shortage of oil, so subsidies were placed on oil seed rape. It became very expensive. Farmers were paid up £445 per hectare ...

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