ABSTRACT
In the Netherlands in the closing months of the Second World War people were forced to eat tulip and daffodil bulbs; there was little else.2 In the ruins of Germany’s bombravaged cities there was even less to eat. The European Economic Community’s common agricultural policy (CAP) was set up only twelve years after these traumatic events had affected millions of Europeans. It is therefore hardly surprising that what preoccupied the policy planners of the 1950s was not the surpluses of today, but ensuring that Europe would never go hungry again. Most of the men who constructed the CAP were also old enough to remember the First World War when Germany and its allies were brought close to starvation by Allied blockade.
