>>Well, the gov may have succeeded in making farmers rich, but doubt the program achieved its aim of alleviating a 'food shortage' Oh, it absolutely did. It created huge surpluses - a problem now largely ameliorated by other programmes. There were grain mountains, wine lakes, milk lakes, etc. This was surplus food which the government bought up and put into storage. No shortages at all. Of course, that didn't mean that no-one was going hungry. Government intervention in the market put the prices up enormously. For some products prices were double the market rate. So some individuals may have been short of food, but Europe as a whole had plenty. The surpluses were often used for 'third world aid'. In plain English that means they were dumped on the market in developing countries free, or virtually free, bankrupting local farmers and in some cases causing the land to fall out of cultivation altogether. On balance, it was, and remains, an even more offensive and damaging policy than America's own agricultural 'protection'. Click
here for more on agricultural protection rackets.