[eru]

Yes, that argument is common, but it doesn't mean that it holds water.

If you actually wanted to ensure a steady food supply, you'd use subsidies that directly target that.

Eg instead of subsidising actual production of a few specific crops, you'd have subsidies that reward being able to produce eg lots of calories in a field on short notice. (And every year, you'd challenge a random selection of recipients to produce the promised calories on short notice. Of course, if you use that land for already for actual production, that's fine.)

You'd also reward people to stockpile lots of canned food, I guess?

> A good deal of early EU politics were measures to make sure that liberalized trade didn't just result in the French agricultural industry vanishing.

Yes, but that's more of a function of the power of the agricultural lobby, than any rational policy.