Policy Changes since 1992

Abstract

After the overview of efforts made to address the CAP’s long term problems during three decades, the question that arises is why, by contrast, the next episode, the 1992 reform, could bring much more drastic changes, and why subsequent reforms continued in this vein. Like Kay (1998), we should avoid any historical determinism which would consider that reform was inevitable notably given the financial situation of the CAP. That would lead to the mistaken view that the EU decision making process is a ‘black box’ (Kay 1998) which only responds to objective, material developments, without any intervention of political players, institutions and stakeholders. Before analysing the successive reforms and proposing an interpretation, this chapter examines their content and general orientation and proposes a method of comparison of the three sets of reforms adopted since the early 1990s. Further changes have been adopted in 2004 and 2005 regarding specific commodities and issues (olive oil, tobacco, cotton, sugar, rural development), but they will not be thoroughly examined here.