Agricultural Transition Plan

It is important to note that since the advent of area-based payments the subsidy payments have been totally decoupled from production. Indeed, had we had our time again a better way to have done it might have been to introduce conditionality to the old payments that were there before. It is already the case that there are people who own a plot of land and claim on it but who are not actually producing food. The logic of our policy today is to focus the payments towards what farmers do with the land, not just dole out money based on how much land they own.