Paper Titles & Abstracts

While in overall terms the EU budget is small in terms of the resources of member states, its significance for agriculture and rural development is much greater. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has always been the main beneficiary of EU level spending and it still takes up around 40 per cent of the budget. The important corollary that results is that most support for agriculture is funded by the CAP rather than national governments. This gives a highly political edge to debates about its reform in the context of economic austerity, negotiations about the overall level of the EU budget, and of the place of agriculture within it. Consequently Commission proposals for the reform and funding of the CAP have been central to negotiations about a new budgetary package for 2014-2020 (the multi-annual financial framework, MFF). After briefly highlighting the historical trends on the development of the CAP and its funding, this paper will consider contemporary debates about CAP reform in the context of the negotiations on the MFF. It will highlight a continuing cleavage among member states - that maps onto a broader budgetary gainers/losers division - between advocates of radical reform (e.g. the UK, Sweden) and those who favour the retention of the traditional CAP (such as France and Ireland). As well as assessing the balance of power between the 'pro-reform' and 'traditional CAP' camps among member states, the paper will consider the importance of potential new configurations of inter-institutional relations ushered in by extension of co-decision to agriculture in the Lisbon Treaty.