Unity and diversity in the Common Agricultural Policy

A persistent narrative is that the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) leaves little room for national agricultural policy action. This chapter examines the history of the CAP in order to assess how much diversity it actually allows, and to what extent it is still a uniform, centrally determined policy. As it turns out, the CAP is a policy that evolved incrementally. While it was indeed originally a strongly centralised policy area, with an emphasis on ‘common’ and ‘agricultural’, over time the CAP’s objectives multiplied, becoming less ‘agricultural’ and also less ‘common’, i.e., granting Member States more flexibility in its implementation. This chapter will argue that the newest CAP policy cycle complicates the picture: while the format of the National Strategic Plans seems to leave Member States quite a lot of room to tailor their domestic implementation and application of the CAP, the cross-compliance requirements with social and environmental standards (such as the EU Green Deal) may actually curtail Member States’ flexibility significantly.