ABSTRACT
Introduction The future of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) round of WTO remains uncertain. Will an agreement ever be reached? If there is a successful completion of the round, when will it occur? Will the agreement on agriculture be ‘ambitious’, or will it bring very little, if any, liberalization to agro-food trade? At the same time as multilateral negotiations were going nowhere, agricultural and rural development policies in the EU were changing, and changing in the direction most third countries desired (although possibly not at the speed nor to the extent they would have perhaps wished). The 2003 Fischler reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which ‘fully decoupled’ a large part of the public support enjoyed by the European farm sector, was the most important single step in the reform process of the CAP which began in the late 1980s. Nor did the reform process stop in 2003; since then all sectors that had hitherto remained untouched by the Fischler reform have undergone similar policy changes and the decisions taken in November 2008 at the end of the ‘health check’ of the CAP took the market reorientation process of EU agricultural policies a step further. Moreover, it is expected that additional relevant policy changes will be considered in the near future. The chapter discusses the past and the future of CAP reforms and of DDA WTO negotiations on agriculture and the linkages between the two parallel processes: CAP reforms and developments in the EU negotiation positions in the round. The first part is devoted to the past, analysing changes since the start of the DDA round in the CAP and EU trade preferences to developing countries, and how the round has developed over the years. The second part of the chapter discusses possible further changes expected in the relatively near future in the CAP and in EU trade policies, and what might, or might not, happen in the WTO negotiations and why.
