Setaside was aimed at stopping overproduction and to stop prices slumping. Leaving land fallow on a rotational basis also cuts down the use of artificial fertilisers

@Moravian Like encouraging sugar beet growing by imposing not only tarrifs but quotas for overseas sugar cane producers, resulting in the collapse of an iconic British Company (Tate & Lyle) and the need for extra foreign aid to the sugar cane countries whose economies they compromised.
Furthermore, beet sugar lacks the trace substances that make cane sugar sweeter, and so more sugar had to be added to processed foods - leading to an obesity crisis. ALL FOR THE SAKE OF MAINLY FRENCH BEET FARMERS - and their vote!

I agree that the common agricultural policy was biased towards French farmers but surely keeping food prices low benefits poorer people more, especially when it is funded by richer taxpayers.

We shouldn't be eating sugar packed processed foods anyway so no great loss.

@Moravian You have just contradicted yourself.
(<Setaside was aimed at stopping overproduction and to stop prices slumping.>
But people do, so use cane sugar amd halve their consumption!

No i haven't. Don't you remember the butter mountains. Overproduction was costing the tax payer even more. Refined sugar is the same no matter where it comes from so why import sugar cane when sugar beet can be grown at home.
Sure people consume sugar but the govt. are making valiant attempts to cut consumption by axing sugary drinks etc.

@Moravian Refined sugar is not the same, that's the whole point. Cane has to be ultra refined to make it pure C12,H22,O11. Blind test after blind test has demonstrated that soda water sweetened with cane tastes sweeter than the equivalent Beet sweetened water.
And why support Beet farmers, who could produce alternative crops, over cane producers who then need handouts?

@Moravian What caused the butter mountain? Oversubsidised French farmers. The butter price was kept artificially high, contradicting your claim of keeping food prices low, and the surplus purchased and stockpiled by the EU. To compound the idiocy, the butter was eventually sold at a great loss to Russia which, a year later, then re-exported it - to the EU!
What an almighty mess, by EU bureaucracy.

@Petter So you don't like the EU then ?. It is bureaucratic but then aren't all govts.?. There have been some silly regulations. I remember something about straight bananas but overall I think the laws on health and safety.animal rights.workers rights etc have been mostly good.
Our fishermen are getting excited thinking they are going to have a free for all again. The common fisheries policy has protected the fish stocks well. I remember the days of the Klondykers when they fished out the herring and then the mackerel. Don't want to go back there again.

As for the sugar, maybe cane sugar has a few trace elements missing from sugar beet but to me processed sugar is "pure white and deadly" so I avoid it as much as I can

@Moravian Talking of bananas, what happened to all those non-Cavendish varieties one used to get in UK at one time? The huge, straight, red bananas from Uganda, the stubby, fat, yellow bananas from Kenya, those almost savoiry bananas that had seeds in them? All victims of compliance to imposed legislation.
UK already had laws on animal rights, "elfin safety", etc. which would have progressively updated.
Then what about the ridiculous situation surrounding Abu Hamza, preventing UK from deporting a 'hate preacher" and forcing the taxpayer to support him in comfort - because of the EU human rights interpretations. What about the human rights of those whose lives were destroyed thanks to his preachings?
I was all in favour of the EEC, but I changed my mind when it became a bureaucracy heavy, corrupt entity intent on self agrandisment. I'm not alone. There are many political parties in Europe now that are seeking to rein it in and take it back to its original purpose.
So, No. I am not against a European Union of trading nations I am against the megalomaniac system into which it has morphed.

@Moravian Here is a link to an essay I wrote on the EU, long before Brexit' had become a word.
[mojacar.ws]
(I had a lot of inside knowledge on the workings of the EU at the time.)

@Petter thanks for that. I realise that the EU is far from perfect and maybe I have been concentrating on the benefits and ignoring the downside. the problem is that it is difficult to get reasoned comment as it is mostly all for or all against.

Re the farm subsidies I grew up in a farming community long before the EU and then farming was even more heavily subsidised than it is now. Farmers on tiny farms which have long since been amalgamated were amongst the wealthiest in the community.

Farmers are still heavily subsidised but unfairly as so called "slipper farmers" are coining it in so that certainly needs looking at.