Reducing farm subsidies

Cutting subsidization of farming

Context

Future policies will need to shift financial support structures away from intensive agricultural production towards broader socio-economic objectives. In these, the maintenance of low-input, biologically diverse systems and their rural communities needs to be paramount. If this is to be achieved at a scale that has ecological meaning, rural policies need to be developed which continue to have farming as their central focus.

Claim

Agricultural subsidies almost always causing farming to become more intensive than it would otherwise be. The effects of this on the environment may be positive (e.g. resisting abandonment), negative (e.g. overstocking) or neutral (e.g. on fertile lowland grasslands, which would still be farmed intensively with or without support).

The combined effects of substantial payments and quota limits make the farming systems very resistant to change, creating a considerable obstacle to farmers adopting any kind of environmental measures which would reduce their receipts from price support or headage payments.