Thriplow Farms Annual Report 2005: Pessimism personified

Agricultural economics, along with chiropody and the paintings of Cy Twombly, is the most boring subject in the world. And if it is boring to a farmer like me, it must be doubly so for the rest of the human race. So brace yourselves for a dollop of tedium. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was invented over fifty years ago for two big reasons (and lots of little ones). The first biggy was to ensure that never again would Europe be vulnerable to U boats sinking our food supplies as they trundled across the Atlantic. The second was to make peasants richer and thus less likely to vote communist. Don’t laugh. In the 1940s nearly half the Italian and French peasants did actually vote communist.Read the full report