European Union misses rare opportunity to change farming rules

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.

Its biggest proposals do not much suit Britain, because they would limit the benefit going to large farmers, of which Britain has many, while helping small ones. Germany and the Czech Republic don't much like them either, for the same reason, and so they may well never survive as policy.

But the biggest objection to them 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.

Farming makes for peculiar politics. People who have nothing at all to do with it care about its survival with passion. For many, it preserves the past of their country, literally and visually (hence some of the passion in Britain about the spread of bright yellow rapeseed). And the grotesque consequences in the past - milk poured away, butter heaped in mountains – have struck at people's instinctive shock at the waste of food, which no amount of justification is able to dispatch.