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2. Italy != Europe. Countries can and will do things differently to other countries.
As if it was a charity lmao, this is a top priority, before defense even, food security will become more and more of a problem, that and water
I don't think its fair to characterize GMO witchhunting as shrewd nationalistic maneuvring to circumvent free trade; my view is that this was driven mainly by genuinely convicted (idealistic instead of pragmatic) environmentalist/anti-corporate activists (similar and overlapping with anti-nuclear sentiment).
Throwing money at farmers to keep them in the country is, like, the main purpose of the thing, and more than a quarter of the budget is spent on it (this is not a recent development, either).
It is not. But France was very good at ring-fencing their interests very early on, resulting in a somewhat-outsized weight of agricultural policy over the Union budget (since it was, back then, almost non-existent in other areas). After the Eastern expansion, it has become very difficult to change the approach (which is, overall, fundamentally successful - yes, there are issues, but nothing is perfect). Pre-brexit, the UK government would be the only one willing to grandstand on reforming the policy, mostly for reasons of internal propaganda; now it's basically in no-one's interest to touch it.
What? A quarter of EU expenditure is spent on agricultural subsidies, i.e. directly paying people to be farmers.