ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts a comparison of the politics and processes of reform of farm policies to identify any similarities that can help to understand the nature of reform and any differences that can highlight the importance of the political and economic context in assessing such reform. Agricultural policies in the US and European Union (EU) have faced similar challenges since the 1970s from chronic farm surpluses. To illustrate more sharply the similarities and differences between the principal agricultural policy reforms in the EU and US during the 1990s it is instructive to compare the MacSharry CAP reform with the US Federal Agriculture Improvement Reform (FAIR) Act. The policy shifts represented by the MacSharry and FAIR Act reforms were accompanied by paradigm shifts, which both facilitated the reforms and were legitimized by the reforms. The MacSharry and FAIR Act reforms legitimated the new paradigms in the sense that the policy changes were consistent with the new thinking.
