"Charles Francis" wrote in message
...
In message , David G. Bell
writes

This was the weakness of the CAP. For generally good reasons, it tried
to keep people in farming.

In so far as I have ever been able to ascertain the reason for the CAP
was to enable French peasant farmers to continue to pay exorbitant rents
to their landlords, whose families dominate the French civil service.


Actually it goes back to an attempt to ensure that French and Italian
Peasants stopped voting communist.
After the 39/45 war, a lot of rural people had become heavily involved in
the communist party because this was the party that (after the invasion of
the soviet union) had pretty well co-ordinated much of the resistance
activity. It looked as if the party leadership hoped to work on its wartime
record and use these as a platform for further expansion. The CAP was an
attempt to ensure that the peasantry was prosperous enough to have a vested
interest in the stability of society.
French rents are based by law on agricultural profitability. Because of the
nature of the Code Napoleon, on death a mans holding is split between his
offspring, and the one wishing to farm will normally rent it back of his
siblings. Eventually this gets more and more complex in that you are the
tenant of a collection of aunts, uncles, cousins to the nth degree and
similar. Obviously occasionally some is purchased back.
Because the French do have a large civil service a lot of the aforementioned
aunts, uncles, and cousins work in it. Because rents are linked by law to
agricultural profitability, the workings of the code Napoleon ensure that
these people, although civil servants, have a vested interest in the
profitability of agriculture. I saw figures that said that a third of the
urban population of France had a vested interest in continued agricultural
profitability.
Hence the Gendarme watching a farmers demonstration knows that if the
farmers succeed, his nephew in the Paris Basin will get a better wheat
price, rents will go up, and the Gendarme and his wife can afford to holiday
in Martinique rather than Brittany.

Jim Webster