Destroying the countryside

From today’s London Daily Telegraph:

The catastrophic decline of farmland birds in Britain due to intensive farming methods is being mirrored across Europe, a new survey reveals. The red-backed shrike has become extinct as a nesting bird in the UK. Europe’s farmland birds have declined by almost half in the past 25 years as a direct consequence of the Common Agricultural Policy, it is claimed.

What is disturbing is not so much the damage that the CAP is doing to the environment, nor its economic wastefulness, nor even its social inequity - it taxes the poor to subsidise the rich. Rather it is the persistence of all these disastrous flaws, in the face of evidence accumulated over decades.