ABSTRACT
In the 1960s anyone attempting to explain the origins and purpose of the European Economic Community might have been tempted to seek that explanation in the history of European agriculture. The Community’s survival seemed repeatedly menaced by noisy public quarrels whose immediate cause was trade in some foodstuff or other. To judge from contemporary newspapers the most serious question in the middle of that decade for the future of a united Europe was the price of wheat. The Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) by the end of the decade took up four-fifths of its administrative effort and 70 per cent of its budget. Yet the member-states were among the most industrialized countries in the world and the Treaties of Rome had been overwhelmingly concerned with trade in manufactures. Agricultural trade was a matter of only secondary importance and the previous chapter found little need to consider it when explaining the background to the treaties. The agricultural sector, furthermore, was of rapidly diminishing weight in the economies of each of the member-states. Nevertheless the economic, social and political problems of agriculture became a central aspect of the Community from the moment the Treaties were signed.
