Ambitions and reality of the common agricultural policy: historical and interdisciplinary perspectives

It is a paradox that since its beginnings in the 1950s the European integration process has been closely tied to agriculture – a sector in decline. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) became the European Community's (EC) first common policy and it was and still is its most expensive single budget item. Due to the annual price negotiations and the important surpluses that emerged already in the mid-1960s – often caricatured as butter mountains and milk lakes – the CAP was by far the most visible and the most contested EC policy. Conversely, repeated attempts to reform the policy over a period of more than two decades failed to bring about the required corrections.