Cows and sheep

The Guardian reminds us that, despite all the years of promised reform, the common agricultural policy remains something of a gravy train:

"The story of Europe's pampered cows is a familiar one but always worth retelling. Each head of cattle in Europe gets a subsidy from the taxpayer worth $2.20 a day at a time when half the world's population - 3 billion people in all - scrapes by on an income of less that that. Rightly, the comparison has been a cause of outrage, and is one of the reasons why the European Union has been under pressure in the current round of global trade talks to make deep inroads into its absurd protectionist regime for agriculture.
Well, here's the stop press: the cows have had a pay rise. Calculations by Oxfam's Duncan Green for 2003 show that the average cow in the Dordogne or Lower Saxony can expect to have $2.62 a day lavished on it. The latest figures for 2003 show that the number of cows is down by 2 million but the total support for producers is up by $1bn to almost $19bn (£10.7bn)."

while The Scotman highlights the fact that some sheep farmers seem to be doing well enough:

"A SCOTTISH lamb has fetched £62,000 at a market sale, making it the most expensive sheep sold in Britain this year - yet the new owners insist they have not been fleeced.
The Blackface ram, McTavish, was bought for double the expected price at an auction in Lanark by a consortium of three breeders.
The record price comes four years after the industry appeared to lie in ruins, when thousands of sheep were burned in heaps during the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis."

So farmers won't need to sell the second Mercedes this month...