Like a combine harvester charging through a field of wheat, market forces are tearing up and shredding the rules of the Common Agricultural Policy, sending civil servants scurrying for cover like disturbed field mice.

Farmers used to get subsidies for growing more grain than Europeans could eat and, eventually, a hue and cry over mountains of unsold grain prompted even more curious market manipulation.

Set-aside, paying farmers a fee to leave land fallow, is more fuel to urban rage against rural dependence, but the market is again upsetting the schemers and planners. A coincidence of market and human forces has descended on Europe’s arable farmland, creating a whirlwind that will change utterly the way in which farming develops in the European Union.

The seeds were sown in 2003 when the EU began its retreat from subsidies, replacing money linked to production with cash grants. Just as Europe’s farmers were being told to plant less, Asians were becoming richer, their diets shifting from rice and vegetables to meat and bread. Meanwhile, governments began to set higher targets for the use of biofuels – the EU wants plant-based fuels to account for 10 per cent of road fuel by 2020. Add to that droughts in Australia and Ukraine and you have a whirlwind in Europe’s farmyards.

Set-aside will surely go, lamented by lovers of meadows, birds and wildflowers. In the UK, set-aside has been a huge administrative rigmarole, in which farmers had to ensure they had set aside a precise number of hectares or lose every penny of subsidy. Its abolition will be greeted with delight by growers anticipating fat profits as the world demands more of their product.

The danger is that policy schemers and planners will now seek to regulate for shortages, rather than surpluses, building up buffer stocks and encouraging the ploughing of every vacant field. They could, instead, let the market decide who can most cheaply feed more of us and let them do it.

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