On Fri, 13 Dec 2002 07:38:58 +0000 (GMT),
("David G. Bell") wrote:

On Friday, in article

"Torsten Brinch" wrote:

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 10:15:45 +0000, Tim Lamb
wrote:

In article , Torsten Brinch
writes
The McSharry reforms were in error AIU and quickly adjusted in
subsequent years.

Meaning no comment on McSharry in either way , may I ask which errors
and adjustments you are referring to?

How did I know I would regret saying this? Someone else may have proper
details, I am merely reporting memories of agricultural magazine comment
of some 7/8 years back.

When you said error in relation to McSharry I got to thinking of the
inability to negotiate any effective capping into the system when it
was created. Without that, the reform turned rather predictably into
an effective instrument to make big farmers outcompete the small
farmers. There was an interview with McSharry, he explained it got
that way, because the policy had to be acceptable to farmer's
organisations, e.g. NFU, which are effectively run by big farmers.

As a small farmer, and an NFU member, I find that horribly plausible.

McSharry himself said in the broadcast, they always seemed to
negotiate the reform with delegations of mediumlarge to large farmers.
The thought of capping was unacceptable to them, it was held that
capping would not be fair to the large farmers -- that is, it was held
to be unfair if the man owning 10,000 hectares of land should not
receive 100 times the income support as the man owning 100 times less
land.

It was said in the broadcast, that NFU gets half their income from
small farmers, so NFU cannot stand up in public and say the policy is
to support big farmers at the expense of small, that would mean
losing half of the paying members. In public it would have to be held
that the policy was there to support the traditional family farm.