The Financial Times has reported on new figures from the French government statistical service showing that French farmers are “getting steadily worse off compared with their fellow citizens and their European peers”. Such figures are grist to the mill of those calling for a strong defense of EU farm support from the internal pressure of the EU budget and the external pressure of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade liberalization negotiations. What such figures fail to show is the changing structure of farming in France as in other European countries and the likelihood that subsidies are actually accentuating inequalities. Continue Reading…