EU rethink on farming comes late

Soaring food prices make few problems better - but they could have proved the key to jettisoning the worst excesses of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy.

Unfortunately, the European Commission has ducked that chance, although yesterday it showed that it did recognise the desirability, at least as a matter of high theory, of getting the EU to produce more crops, after decades of trying to persuade it to do exactly the opposite.

The biggest objection to the commission's proposals is that they waste this opportunity, with cash showering down on the world's farmers, to change the rules. They fit perfectly in the grand tradition of the CAP - of using subsidies to sustain an otherwise unsustainable way of life while trying to conceal this purpose.

More than almost any other industry, farming varies between Europe's member countries, from the huge farms of Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic to the tiny ones of Italy and Greece. Every change to the CAP is someone's loss.