Comment by nekzn
2 hours ago
Agricultural areas? After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades, now Europe wants to become an autarky?
2 hours ago
Agricultural areas? After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades, now Europe wants to become an autarky?
1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.
> 1. The EU spends enormous sums subsidising farmers.
As if it was a charity lmao, this is a top priority, before defense even, food security will become more and more of a problem, that and water
But EU does not pay farmers to farm efficiently and produce more food but does it to keep inefficient ones going so not much to do with actual food security.
It shows free trade was a hypocritical charade even before Trump. Europe spent years inventing reasons why US grain and soybeans had to be excluded. GMO witch hunting, for example.
If your position is that farmers in the EU or Italy specifically have no lobby then you could not be more wrong.
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
> the main purpose of the thing
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
The EU is an agricultural union with a bit of other stuff sprinkled on top.
That was true 30 years ago, but is less true today. That doesn't mean farmers don't have inordinate power, but that's the same in most developed countries with rural areas (see also, the USA, Japan, etc).
This has nothing to do with EU. This is a regional law in a part of Italy. It’s like saying ”Now Americans want X” for what a random city somewhere in US made a rule about.
> After bribing people to abandon the agricultural sector for decades
What? A quarter of EU expenditure is spent on agricultural subsidies, i.e. directly paying people to be farmers.
I imagine they're thinking of late 19th century. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯