""David G. Bell"" wrote in message

I've seen the Aral sea from the air:-((

I'm surprised it's still visible.

When I saw it you could see succeeding shore lines, almost like looking down
on a contour map or the rings on a tree stump.



That is what you have to break away from. The grinding poverty which
doesn't
actually give you time to get away from your grinding poverty

This was the weakness of the CAP. For generally good reasons, it tried
to keep people in farming. When those reasons went away, the EU
politicians couldn't break the habit, and the whole mess of the MTR
comes from politicians being scared that people don't want to farm.


to a certain extent I can see why. In some member states, if you put half
the farmers onto the job market you would do serious things to the
unemployment statistics and get pretty big social/political problems. Do
this in the new entrants and it could get even more scary as one can imagine
the EU being blamed and a wave of anti-EU feeling in a lot of member states.

Jim Webster