Looking in the Rear-View Mirror: Changes in the Common Agricultural Policy in the First Five years of EuroChoices

Abstract

In the field of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), it was widely expected that the end of the 20th century (and the beginning of the 21st) was going to end quietly. However, when the first issue of EuroChoices appeared in 2001, the CAP was again immersed in profound changes, in ‘a paradox: a CAP reform without budget, WTO or food safety crisis’. The article underlines the different factors, including the key role played by the Commissioner Franz Fischler, which explain the radical changes in the CAP which took place in the first years of this century. Fischler’s mandate marked several steps in the advancement of the modernisation of the CAP and confirmed the road towards its market orientation. The ‘CAP medical check’ promoted by his successor, the Danish Commissioner Marian Fischer-Boel, deepened the reform process and even extended it to the sugar, milk and wine sectors. The time had then come to tackle more decisively other challenges such as the mitigation and adaptation to climate change, the imbalance in the food chain or the differences in public support to farmers across different European countries.