In the spring of 1933, American farmers pleaded for help from their newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt. Hog prices were at record lows, and the farmers wanted the government to do something.
Not one to let a crisis go to waste, FDR took action. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace was tasked with arranging the slaughter of millions of pigs in an effort to raise hog prices. Farmers who participated in the federal government’s hog program — later dubbed by economists “the porcine slaughter of the innocents” — were compensated. Their animals were turned into “inedible meat and bone meal,” courtesy of US taxpayers, even as hunger in America hit record highs.
A country destroying its own food during a depression might sound like economic madness, and it is — but we are once again watching governments ramp up policies that pay farmers to destroy food.
It’s no secret that European vineyards have been disappearing for years. The trend is starkest in Pyrénées-Orientales in southern France: that region “lost nearly half its vines” between 2000 and 2020, The Economist recently reported. Limited access to water and rising energy costs played a role. But vineyards have vanished with increasing speed in recent years, thanks to government policies.
In 2024, the French government revived a familiar tactic: paying farmers to rip out their vines. Under this national program, farmers can receive roughly €4,000 (about $4,600) for every hectare they remove. If lawmakers aimed to see the country produce less wine and hasten the disappearance of vineyards, that’s what they got.
France typically produces well over 40 million hectoliters of wine annually, but in 2025 it produced just 36 million, according to the French Ministry of Agriculture. Meanwhile, growers in the Languedoc-Roussillon region saw a surge in vines removed last year — roughly 15,000 hectares, an area approaching the size of Washington, D.C., according to The Economist.
Many might assume climate concerns drove France’s policy, but the primary reason resembles the catalyst for FDR’s “porcine slaughter of the innocents”: oversupply.
Global trends show fewer people drinking alcohol, especially Gen Z. Wine has taken a particularly hard hit, even in France, where red wine consumption recently reached an all-time low. French lawmakers say their policy is designed to “rescue” the wine industry from what the ministry described as excessive output.
To the average person, paying vineyard owners to destroy their vines likely looks crazy — but in Europe, it’s business as usual.
For years, the European Union has attempted to micromanage wine production through various incentives, including direct payments to farmers to remove vines. A European Parliament report found that the EU’s 2008 wine reform set an aggressive target: removal of 175,000 hectares with commitments to not replant. (Actual removal totaled 160,550 hectares.)
Now it appears Brussels is intent on ramping up its policy. The EU’s most recent Wine Package will, among other measures, make it easier for countries to make direct payments to farmers to destroy their vines.
“…new rules on State aid would allow Member States to use national financing not only for distillation of surplus wine,” the package reads, “but also for green harvesting (the total destruction or removal of grapes while still in their immature stage) and grubbing up (complete elimination of all vine stocks) of vineyards.”
There’s a certain irony in the policy.
For decades, the EU subsidized wine production, resulting in surplusses critics dubbed “wine lakes.” Now Brussels wants to ratchet up efforts to rip out vines — to curb the very surplus that bureaucrats helped create.
There’s a senselessness to Europe’s approach that matches New Deal efforts to alleviate poverty by destroying millions of pigs. At least some New Dealers eventually learned their interventionist policies were failing.
“We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work,” United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. admitted to Congress in 1939. “I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job, I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.”
Morgenthau learned the hard way that trying to engineer a market economy from Washington — through spending, controls, and heavy-handed intervention — produced results far different from those promised.
We can only hope lawmakers in Europe eventually learn the same lesson.
Markets aren’t perfect, but they aggregate information from millions of buyers and sellers far better than bureaucrats, who can’t seem to decide whether to subsidize vineyards to boost production or destroy them to raise prices.
These contradictions will do long-term harm to vineyards. That’s a shame. A world with less wine is a less happy world.
