The European Union Common Agricultural Policy

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the oldest and one of the most controversial policies in the European Union. With the initial objective of making the countries of the Union self-sufficient in food goods, it began with generous support to farmers through guaranteed and high prices, for unlimited produced quantities, accompanied by trade protection vis-à-vis third countries. The Union quickly started to produce food surpluses, which were exported at subsidized prices. These instruments have enabled the CAP to achieve its objectives, albeit at a high budgetary cost. The agreement on agriculture resulting from the Uruguay Round led to a profound change in the way this policy works, at a time when the agricultural sector in the countries of the Union had already evolved enough to be able to compete internationally without previous support. From the first decade of the 21st Century the CAP has begun supporting agriculture in the more general context of the promotion of rural development, while placing environmental issues at the top of its priorities. The reference model of the CAP has always been that of family farming, although since the 1990s there has been a movement towards the concentration of land ownership and a tendency for the domination of agricultural production by the agri-food industry and the distribution chains. The CAP today faces three challenges: that of safeguarding the family farming model in the face of dominance over the sector by downstream agents of the food chain (balance of powers within the chain); the compatibility of large-scale agricultural production with the imperative of environmental protection; and that of framing the sector in a diversified rural development model