The common agricultural policy and EU solidarity

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/24/the-common-agricultural-policy-and-eu-solidarity

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Giles Fraser says the EU “has become a huge and largely invisible way of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich” (Why our landed gentry are so desperate to stay in the EU, 21 April). Clearly there is an element of the common agricultural policy that does do just that, to which capping payments to rich farmers may be the answer, but the overall situation is in fact the opposite.

According to the eminent historian Tony Judt in his masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, “taken all in all, the EU is a good thing … from the late eighties, the budgets of the European Community and the Union nevertheless had a distinctly redistributive quality, transferring resources from wealthy regions to poorer ones and contributing to a steady reduction in the aggregate gap between rich and poor: substituting, in effect, for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation.”

It’s because of this approach that poor regions like mine, the north-east of England, are net beneficiaries of EU funding despite the fact we belong to a net contributing nation. In the 80s the EU helped lift Spain, Portugal and Ireland out of relative poverty and the same process is under way today with the countries of eastern Europe. Fraser has missed the big picture – the EU is actually a socialist plot, but be careful who you tell that to.Paul Brannen MEPLabour’s agriculture spokesperson in the European parliament

• Giles Fraser’s column may have misled your readers. He said that the “more problematic” aspect of the CAP was the dumping of overproduction on the developing world, relying on 2007 figures. What he should have acknowledged was that, since then, the CAP has been reformed to remove subsidy for production and to replace it with payments to farmers that are conditional on maintaining land in good environmental and agricultural condition. The days of large surpluses dumped on the rest of the world have gone.

The CAP is still not perfect by any means. But his point that wealthy farmers unduly benefit from it would have more force if his friends in the out campaign were not busy running round assuring farmers that subsidies would be fully protected post-Brexit: the out campaign can’t have it both ways. But, more to the point, the cause of continued reform of the CAP would be very badly served if the UK were to take his advice and flounce out of the EU: the UK has been the most persistent and effective advocate for reform.George Peretz QCLondon

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