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Sustainability in 3rd world agriculture
"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 |
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