ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) is at the forefront of human institutions engaged in risk science and risk management. The EU has come a long way from a food policy based upon security to one that is increasingly based upon safety. In the process, the consumer has replaced the producer at the center of food policy agendas. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a policy instrument that still is contentious, has been superseded in ways unimagined within the EU itself. Beginning in the early 1990s, the EU began reducing funding to the CAP in favor of structural measures aimed at diversifying rural Europe. A policy canopy that embraced measures as wideranging as eco-tourism, organic agriculture and aquaculture emerged as “long-term” alternatives to the subsidies that generated the notorious “mountains” of butter and beef.
