NON-EXISTENT COWS – AND SUBSIDISED GOLF COURSES
THE EU spends the largest proportion of our money on farming — £50 billion. And this is rising by ¤1 billion a year.
The Common Agricultural Policy ( CAP) gives farmers and landowners a direct subsidy for their land and crops, as well as setting minimum prices for European produce.
Importantly for us, it also imposes strict import tariffs and quotas on any produce from the rest of the world.
And that, of course, is against British interests because of our ties with the Commonwealth. We knew this before we joined the Common Market — and it proved a sticking point.
At the time, however, we were assured that Commonwealth trade would not be harmed.
It was a false promise. In 2010, for instance, butter from New Zealand was hit with a £25 million EU import tax — putting up the price of every pound bought at the checkout by 25p.
And that’s not all. EU restrictions on world trade have added £5 billion to what Britain spends each year on food.
For a two-child family, that means an extra £398.
Add to that what we have to pay the EU specifically for the CAP, and the total bill to Britain is over £10 billion every year.
Can we be sure that the vast sums we pay will go to the right places? Unfortunately not. To take just a few examples:
IN ITALY, more than one in five subsidised special beef cows didn’t exist.
IN SLOVENIA, half of subsidised suckler cows were also fictional.
IN GERMANY, cash to help farmers buy seasonal equipment ended up being used to build waste treatment plants, roads, sports facilities, landscape businesses and golf courses.
IN SPAIN, ¤3 million (£2.4 million) was supposed to go on things like irrigation and greenhouses. Instead, 98 per cent of it was spent on cardboard boxes.
The CAP even affects animal welfare. Rather than seeking to improve it, the EU offers large financial incentives to battery farms.
EU countries with poor welfare standards have the advantage. So imports of pork from Denmark, for instance, easily undercut our more humanely reared British pork.
It’s hard to imagine a worse system. Riddled with fraud, it stops us buying cheaper food from elsewhere and encourages factory farming, while swelling the coffers of all of the biggest farmers.