A history of policy endurance: the common agricultural policy 1957-2020

Abstract

Since its beginnings in the 1950s the history of European integration has been tied to agriculture. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) became the first European Community (EC) common policy and has been its most expensive single budget item ever since. The CAP is both passionately defended and fiercely criticised, standing out as the single most controversial policy of the history of European integration. In more than five decades of existence it has been reformed numerous times, some reforms being mere attempts to reduce its costs, others somewhat more radical have transformed the way the European Union (EU) aids and protects its agricultural sector. The CAP has been analysed and discussed to various degrees on different spheres. In the scholarly sphere, economists, sociologists, political scientists and more recently historians have scrutinised the CAP from top to bottom to understand its main drivers and constraints. In the political sphere, politicians have always manoeuvred to secure a policy, which, although far too complex to understand, provides them local support. In the general public sphere, the CAP resides as an almost invisible policy, rarely mentioned, less discussed, except by the agricultural actors themselves. Despite the controversy, analyses and discussions, the truth is that the CAP, conceived to overcome very specific objectives in a post-war, food-scarce, food-unsafe EC, endures sixty-one years after its inception. In the present EU, where agriculture is still the sector in decline, where issues such as international terrorism, climate change, immigration and public health matters cover most of the public scope, how can the endurance of the CAP be explained? Why is there such a resistance to turn the page on a policy that could open the door to other, fairer, more effective, less controversial, policies? The purpose of this thesis is to analyse this endurance and to understand why despite the controversy, the discussions and the attempts to reform, the CAP remains unbeatable at the centre of European policies. It is not the purpose of this paper to advice European politicians on alternative policies for the EU, but rather to suggest that the CAP, as once conceived, has long overdue its life expectancy and is a dispensable policy in the EU.