Balance de dos décadas de políticas de desarrollo agrario y rural en el País Vasco

Agriculture and the rural environment in the Basque country have for decades been undergoing a far-reaching process of transformation. With the establishment of autonomy in the region agricultural and rural policies received a major boost, though when Spain joined the European Economic Community those policies were necessarily linked to the lines laid down by the CAP and its subsequent reforms. For a decade now, more emphasis has been placed on rural development policies than on sectoral policies, though at the same time some degree of overlap and mixing between rural development, agricultural development and agrienvironmental policies and programmes can be seen. In the long run this results in confusion and the mixing up of objectives, thus making the necessary task of monitoring and assessing these policies more difficult. The rural development programmes applied have achieved notable success, but a distinction must be drawn in so far as is possible between just how much of that success is attributable to the actual programmes and how much to the economic boom in which they took place.