The Common Agricultural Policy: Policy Dynamics in a Changing Context

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a unique agricultural policy worldwide. For many years, its status as the only common European Community (EC) policy governed by EC institutions put it at the heart of European integration. Today the CAP is not the only common European Union (EU) policy. Even while it remains the sole instance of a regionally integrated agricultural policy, the CAP no longer embodies the same degree of cross-national harmonization of agricultural policy among EC/EU member states that it once did.

The CAP has undergone policy reforms in the past two decades and these reforms have spawned a host of questions. What has caused the CAP to reform? How path-breaking are CAP reforms? Are they consistent with founding CAP goals or do they encompass new ideas about agriculture’s place in the economy and society? And what are the consequences of agricultural policy reforms: for European farmers, consumers and taxpayers; for European ‘public goods’ such as environmental sustainability and preservation of rural communities and landscapes; and for third parties outside the EU, including the WTO?

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

Grace Skogstad is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Internationalization and Canadian Agriculture: Policy and Governing Paradigms (2008). She has edited or co-edited four books and published over sixty articles and book chapters.

Amy Verdun is Professor of Political Science, Jean Monnet Chair, the Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Victoria, in Victoria BC, Canada where she has been since 1997. She is author or editor of twelve books and has published and published about a hundred articles and book chapters the latest of which is, co-edited with Pompeo della Posta, Globalization, Development and Integration (2009) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).