AGRICULTURAL POLICY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION; Proceedings of the 4th Minnesota Padova Conference on Food, Agriculture, and the Environment, September 4-10, 1994, Wayzata, Minnesota

The reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) adopted on 21 May 1992, to be implemented by 1996, anticipates some essential features of the 1994 Uruguay GATT Agreement to be implemented between 1995 and 2000. Together these two events will change substantially, and sometimes reverse, the past trends in the EU agricultural policy, and generate unprecedented changes in production, trade, as well as in producers' and consumers' welfare, creating conditions for a more timely structural adjustment. This paper will first outline the new scenario of agricultural policy in the EU in order to better devise its likely impact on the economy, namely on income distribution, on resource allocation and on the natural and social environment. A third part of the paper will focus on the perspective developments of the CAP before the beginning of the next round of multilateral negotiations in 1999, examining the possibility of a further progress of CAP reform triggered by the implementation of the GATT agreement and by a better information among European citizens of the effects of existing agricultural policies.