Let Them Drink Milk

The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is perhaps one of the EU's most contentious programs. While agricultural subsidies may have met a post-WWII need for Europe to rebuild its economy and security, the long term costs of the program were not critically evaluated. Then, it guaranteed food prices and supplies while also promising a decent standard of living to farmers. Now, it limits the free-market with questionably logical or useful quotas.

Today, at a time of a growing food crisis, European countries like France, Germany, Spain, and Austria stubbornly continue to guard and support CAP (which, in those states, largely pays for itself). Furthermore, these states even push for the elimination or decrease of proposed cuts in the program. Take, for example, the situation described by on the Foreign Policy Blog. At the same time that the milk quotas limiting production are to be increased and eventually eliminated, German dairy farmers are striking and demanding even higher prices for milk.

On the other hand, the UK loses in comparison to the amount it pays into CAP, and it has thus battled the CAP since the Thatcher years. Countries outside of Europe, like the US, complain that the CAP violates free market principles. In an Economist article titled “Let Them Eat Cake,” a comparison is drawn between Marie-Antionette and the EU agricultural ministers who refuse to make reforms:

“If they insist, they will have created Marie-Antoinette protection: 'Let them export cake.' She had her head cut off, to the cheers of the sans-culottes. Something for European farm ministers to ponder.”

The CAP argument is nothing new; in the early 1990s, Ray McSharry was nicknamed ‘Oliver Cromwell’ by an Irish population resenting his successful attempts at CAP reforms. In his day, the successful completion of the GATT talks was at stake. In 2008, the accelerated increase in food prices again raises the stakes and draws global leaders’ attention to the CAP problem. To learn more about this issue, check out the New York Times article titled “Rising Food Prices Sharpen a European Debate.” To learn more about the CAP milk quota situation, visit the Economist article titled “Farm Follies Revisited.”