Europe and the Common Agricultural Policy
The CAP was introduced in 1962 in order to ensure that EU farmers were protected against low prices. The EU agreed to establish a minimum intervention price, meaning that should the price of agricultural produce fall below this level governments would buy farmers’ crops. Recent reforms have changed the nature of intervention, meaning that governments now subsidise farmers according to the size of their farms, rather than the number of crops that they grow. However, the economic case favours the dismantling of the CAP.
