The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) consumes around 45% of the EU’s entire budget. Since its inception in the 1960s, it has continously been criticised for being inefficient, encouraging unsustainable farm production, and for its discrimination of non-EU producers. How did a sector of diminishing social and economic importance manage to maintain such political priority while at the same time leading to a series of controversial consequences? Ann-Christina L. Knudsen’s research demonstrates what the mechanisms of policy stability and change in the CAP have been over time.

Knudsen has examined how and why this controversial policy regime at the heart of the EU was conceived. In her extensive research into the political origins of the CAP in the 1950s and 1960s, she demonstrates how the political choices of designing the CAP were linked to objectives of improving incomes for farmers that were fairly similar across the EC member states. Prior to the CAP, the member states each had far-reaching national agricultural welfare policies, but these had generally not been sufficiently able to stabilising farm incomes. During the 1960s, the social inequalities in farming were accentuated as incomes in other sectors grew markedly. The moral economy of the CAP was underpinned by a discourse on the value of maintaining the family farm in Europe. The political processes of making of the CAP, moreover, reflected diverging views of what role the sector might play in economic growth models.

The welfarist and social policy objectives of the CAP – different to how the EC/EU regulates most other sectors – have remained a key priority of the CAP ever since, and farm incomes, on average, still remain lower than in many other sectors in the EU today. The means of farm support have however changed significantly since the 1990s. Knudsen’s work has also examied the EU’s switch to ‘conditionality’ in granting farm subsidies that reward non-agricultural production services such as improved food security and safety, quality-labelled food products, animal welfare, landscape maintenance, and sustainable production methods. The socio-economic and political challenges that involve the agricultural sector today are numerous and ever-changing,  ranging from social inequality, migration and (un)employment, over food and nutritional demands, to finding a balance between divergent demands for sustainability. The EU will face these challenges head-on again in the 2013-reform of the CAP, as well as in its external negotations with its global trading partners. Despite the current financial and economic crisis in the EU, the reform is not likely to dramatically alter the deep-rooted core priorites of the CAP, but it is among others likely to provide further support for non-conventional farm production within the EU.

Ann-Christina L. Knudsen is Associate Professor of European Studies, Institute for Culture and Society, Aarhus University; email: alknudsen@hum.au.dk. She is the author of the monograph Farmers on Welfare. The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2009) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100368200