CAP - Thinking Out of the Box: Further modernisation of the CAP – why, what and how?

Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy has constantly evolved since its foundation in the 1960s, not least because the EU itself has expanded in membership and reach. Notwithstanding the constructive developments of the CAP since the mid-1990s, it is argued here that the current principal support expenditures, the Pillar 1 Direct Payments are inefficient, ineffective and inequitable in relation to stated objectives and these must be further reformed. This report identifies that land and risk management are the two areas requiring greatest further development and it recommends ways this should be done. However, there is a great deal of inertia in EU decision procedures and in the absence of something radical to break the current system, there is a danger of repeating the experience since 2005 of a sequence of inadequate, sub-optimal reforms, or even worse, reversals. Ideas are offered to break the log jam and thereby offer a way of achieving a reform of the CAP which can fulfil its purpose of enabling a productive, resource efficient and economically viable agriculture, which is environmentally sustainable too protecting climate and biodiversity and embedded in thriving, integrated rural economies – over the whole EU territory.nrpages: 80status: publishe