Do European Agricultural Policies Still Aim to Support the Living Standards of the Agricultural Community?

Abstract

There is a continuing mismatch in the EU between a key official stated objective of the latest form of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which still refers to ensuring a ‘fair standard of living for the agricultural community’ (clearly a social aim), and the way that farmer incomes are officially monitored and interventions designed. Poor targeting at low‐income cases where standards of living could be expected to be less than ‘fair’ is likely to make the CAP vulnerable to criticism for being wasteful of public resources, yet this has been ignored for political reasons. Following the UK's withdrawal from the EU (‘Brexit’), the CAP no longer applies in the UK, and UK agricultural policies have been able to abandon the explicit aim of guaranteeing living standards of farm households. There is no reliable evidence that, as a group, UK farm households are characterised by relative income‐poverty; though instability is a problem, they frequently have multiple income sources and hold substantial wealth, both of which impact on their potential standard of living. In the absence of evidence of low household incomes among its farmers, should the EU follow the UK's example and, in effect, transfer responsibility for alleviating poverty to national systems designed to tackle that problem in the community?