Soaring food prices make few problems better - but they could have proved the key to jettisoning the worst excesses of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Unfortunately, the European Commission has ducked that chance, although yesterday it showed that it did recognise the desirability, at least as a matter of high theory, of getting the EU to produce more crops, after decades of trying to persuade it to do exactly the opposite.

Its biggest proposals do not much suit Britain, because they would limit the benefit going to large farmers, of which Britain has many, while helping small ones. Germany and the Czech Republic don’t much like them either, for the same reason, and so they may well never survive as policy.

But the biggest objection to them is that they waste this opportunity, with cash showering down on the world’s farmers, to change the rules. They fit perfectly in the grand tradition of the CAP – of using subsidies to sustain an otherwise unsustainable way of life while trying to conceal this purpose.

Farming makes for peculiar politics. People who have nothing at all to do with it care about its survival with passion. For many, it preserves the past of their country, literally and visually (hence some of the passion in Britain about the spread of bright yellow rapeseed). And the grotesque consequences in the past - milk poured away, butter heaped in mountains – have struck at people’s instinctive shock at the waste of food, which no amount of justification is able to dispatch.

Yet more than almost any other industry, it varies between Europe’s member countries, from the huge farms of Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic to the tiny ones of Italy and Greece. Every change to the CAP is someone’s loss.

Out of yesterday’s ideas, the best one would also have the most visible impact: to scrap the payments for “setting aside” a tenth of land. This has been a crude way of cutting production, of very patchy benefit to wildlife. It deserves to go. But the second main proposal - to cut subsidies to larger farms and to divert the money to rural development – is misguided. If Europe is going to have farming, then it should be efficient, and produce food as cheaply as possible. If Europe wants intact rural communities, then it should support those directly, acknowledging the cost of doing so. Otherwise, it will have what it has now: expensive food, and rural communities clinging to strands of whimsical subsidies, knowing that each gust of the political wind could mean the end of their livelihoods.

The Open Europe lobby group, which takes a caustic look at EU finances, is right to argue that the proposals do not reflect the sudden changes in farm finances worldwide, quoting estimates by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that the CAP costs the EU €125 billion a year in higher prices and taxes, and that EU food is a fifth above the world price.

This should be intolerable, now more than ever. It is true, up to a point, that the Commission is limited by deals already done to change the CAP in six years’ time. But yesterday’s offerings fail to capture the drama, urgency and opportunity of a world where farming, suddenly, could pay well.

Times Recommends

• Farwell to the stiff upper lip
• It’s about who runs the US, not health
• The Iron Lady and her blue felt-tip sympathy