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Implementation of the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy: expectations, fears, failures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Werner J. Feld
Werner J. Feld
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of The European Community in World Affairs.
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Abstract

During the 1970s the European Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), acclaimed only a decade earlier as prominent evidence of successful integration of member states, manifest major defects. Farm prices to the consumers increased continually, large surpluses of certain farm commodities accumulated, the cost of operating the CAP rose tremendously, and recurring changes of member state currencies made a shambles of the common price and market concept. Several general and specific causes of those problems can be identified. Strongly influenced by powerful national farm lobbies, the member governments have imposed their own interests, often at variance with the “common” interest, upon the Community decision-making framework. The large number of national officials participating in the CAP implementation process has tended to strengthen trends toward policy outcomes undesirable from the Community perspective. More specifically, the main cause for disrupting agricultural price and market unity has been the system of “green” currency rates and the monetary compensatory amounts (MCAs) which have provided the member governments with opportunities to reconstitute national control over farm prices. Fear of domestic political repercussions has restricted the creation of vigorous policies to counter surpluses, and structural improvement of farms, badly needed in some regions of the Community, has been slow.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , Summer 1979 , pp. 335 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1979

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References

The author would like to express his appreciation for travel support provided by the Commission of the European Communities to conduct research in Brussels.

1 Linberg, Leon N. and Scheingold, Stuart A., Europe's Would-Be Polity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970), p. 141Google Scholar.

1 The Economist, 1 April 1978, pp. 60–62.

3 Ibid., p. 62.

4 Koester, Ulrich, EG-Agrapolitik in der Sackgasse (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 4 (Summer 1978): 484–487Google Scholar.

5 Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildavsky define implementation as a process of interaction between setting of goals and actions geared to achieve those goals. “Implementation… is the ability to forge subsequent links in the causal chain so as to obtain the desired results.” See Implementation (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1974), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

6 See Supplement 2/75 to Bulletin of the European Communities, Stocktaking of the Common Agricultural Policy (25 February 1974).

7 For details see EC Commission, EAGCF: Importance and Functioning (Brussels-Luxembourg, 1978), pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

8 For fruits and vegetables the basic protection is not the import levy, but tariffs that are more or less loosely related to a “reference price” system.

9 See Lindberg, and Scheingold, , op. cit., pp. 147–8Google Scholar.

10 Agence Europe Bulletin, 12 May 1978.

11 The Economist,1 April 1978, p. 60.

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13 Ibid., p. 47, Table 2, and Seventh General Report (1973), p. 82.

14 For details see EC Commission, Economic Effects of the Agri-Monetary System (Brussels, 10 02 1978), p. 5Google Scholar.

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18 Economic Effects of the Agri-Monetary System, op. cit., p. 13.

19 Ibid., p. 12.

20 Ibid., p. 18. These irregularities, mostly related to the beef and veal sectors, cost the EAGGF more than $6 million.

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22 Directives 72/159/EEC, 72/160/EEC, 72/161/EEC.

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24 Ibid., see also Directive 75/268/EEC for details.

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31 This should not surprise any knowledgeable American. See the interesting article by Porter, Laurellen, “Congress and Agricultural Policy,” Policy Studies Journal 4, 6 (Summer 1978): 472–479CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 KoelnerSladt-Anzeiger,31 August 1978 and SueddeutscheZeitung, 4 September 1978.

34 Agence Europe Bulletin, 13 May 1978.

35 For details see Agence Europe Bulletin, 18 May 1978.

36 Ibid., 16/17 May 1978.

37 See International Herald Tribune, 8–9 July 1978; and The Economist, 27 May 1978, pp. 55–56.

38 See Agence Europe, 22, 24 November 1978, and The Economist, 28 November-1 December 1978, p. 59.

39 New York Times, 30 December 1978, p. 25.

40 See Stocktaking of the Common Agricultural Policy, op. cit., pp. 14–29.

41 Agence Europe Bulletin, 12, 13 May 1978.

41 For full details see Feld, Werner J. and Wildgen, John K., Domestic Political Realities and European Integration (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977), pp. 119–137Google Scholar.

43 For a full discussion of officials’ motives and goals, see Downs, Anthony, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), pp. 79–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Halperin, Morton H., “Why Bureaucrats Play Games,” Foreign Policy (05 1971): 79–90Google Scholar.

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47 See The Economist, 9–15 December 1978, pp. 17–18.

48 See Stocktaking of the Common Agricultural Policy, op. cit., pp. 34–35.

49 Ibid., pp. 12–30.

50 For details see Commission of the EC, General Consideration on the Problems of Enlargement, 24 04 1978, COM(78) 120 FinalGoogle Scholar.

51 International Herald Tribune, 19, 27 July 1978.

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