The previous chapter demonstrated that global trade in agricultural products continues to be plagued by various distortions that can be traced back to government policy, which chiefly serves concrete local, national, or— in the case of the EU—regional interests. As a result, in the biannual ministerial conferences held as part of the WTO Doha Round, different groups of countries often find themselves diametrically opposed to each other: the EU and its member states, the US (which also has diverging interests per state), the so-called Cairns group made up of 19 countries that together represent more than 25 per cent of global exports in agricultural products, and finally the group of developing countries. The latter group is large and heterogeneous, and within this group we can differentiate between various coalitions. The WTO identifies as many as 16 different coalitions that each take a common position in the negotiations on topics concerning agriculture. The EU does not belong to any coalition, and most coalitions are made up exclusively of developing countries (see https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/agric_e/negoti_groups_e.htm).

For a long time, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the cornerstone of European integration policy, and not only because almost two thirds of the EU budget initially went on agriculture-related expenditure. Almost every other policy domain at the European level was linked to, or suffered the consequences of, the CAP. And though the original aim of the Europeanisation of agricultural policy was to provide a reasonable standard of living for Europe's farming population and to simultaneously safeguard internal food supplies, in the course of the integration process the CAP began to have an increasingly significant impact on the EU’s external relations. The previous chapter explained the CAP's relationship with EU trade policy; the CAP's relationship with the EU's development policy was—and still is, albeit to a lesser extent—also often an adverse one. A notorious episode from the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s was the EU's financial aid, via its development budget, to West African farmers to build up their local livestock, while at the same time frozen beef from the EU was being dumped on their local markets via the CAP's export restitutions, which resulted in the West African farmers and their budding businesses being undercut by European producers.