ABSTRACT
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has arguably constituted the most contentious as well as the most expensive of the European Union's policies. Its objectives, as set out in Article 39 of the Treaty of Rome, were to stabilise volatile markets for agricultural produce, and may be paraphrased as follows: • to increase agricultural productivity by the rational application of
technology to the factors of production, including labour; • to promote supply-side equilibrium, thereby ensuring a reasonable standard
of living for the agricultural community; and • to promote demand-side equilibrium, thereby guaranteeing food
availability to consumers at reasonable prices. That the CAP succeeded in achieving the first objective is not in doubt (Robinson, 1991); the second objective has been achieved superficially and at some social cost (Walsh, 1991); while the third objective cannot be said to have been achieved at all (Robinson, 1990). Furthermore, the issue of availability and cost of food is now wholly overshadowed by questions about quality, which at the time of introduction of the CAP was taken for granted. The existence of this gradient of successfulness, and even the advent of the various food scares of the 1990s, is hardly surprising, given that to both maximise farm incomes and minimise consumer prices might be seen as being mutually exclusive (Walsh, 1991). Yet it was probably never seriously in doubt that, as Pearce (1983) has emphasised, the policy's chief objective would be to maintain farm income and that its principal instrument would be price support. The outcome more than met the expectation; Ritson (1997) notes that what was unusual about the CAP was the severity with which that one objective came to dominate the way in which the policy was implemented.
The huge expense of achieving such indifferent results has consistently undermined the public perception of "Europe". The perceived lack of benefits has been reinforced by a tripartite awareness, by farmers, by consumers and by environmental pressure groups, of specific and wide-ranging disbenefits. Few remained untouched by negative aspects of the CAP: it was responsible for stress in smaller and more marginal farm households; it raised the cost of living for millions of ordinary households in housing estates the length and breadth of Europe; and, finally, it left its mark on the environment of the countryside. Precisely because for too long it remained "obstinately production-orientated" (Gilg, 1991: 75), it encouraged agriculture to shift from a system based at farm and local community level to one dominated by agribusiness, with its unswerving focus on input supply, output processing and distribution: in other words, industrial-type production based upon economic efficiency, profit maximisation and maximum use of technological inputs (Robinson, 1991).
