The food shortages that beset individual European countries in 1945 had been
transformed into surpluses that a common European agricultural policy struggled in
vain to control by the 1980s. In the same period, the v
olume of agricultural output in
the United Kingdom rose by 255 per cent, with the pace of change reaching its peak
of 2.8 per cent per annum in the years from 1945 to 1965 (Brassley, 2000ESR
