New and improved CAP?

“It is certainly not the time to abolish CAP, as some have suggested. The market has a very important role to play, but left to itself, it will not care for our landscapes or respond to other public demands. And if we strip farming of all defences against occasional crises, we gamble with our food supply. Therefore, now is the time to push further ahead in the direction which we have already taken. ”

It is with the above words that European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Mariann Fischer Boel presented the the Health Check Proposal in Strasbourg on 20 May this year.

The European Commission claims that the Health Check of the CAP is not about fundamental reform. It is about streamlining and improving the policy in the light of experience, freeing the EU farmers to respond to increasing demand and meeting new challenges like climate change.

The proposals have received a mixed response. The UK Select Committee took the view that “the proposals are going in the right direction, but that in terms of placing European agriculture in a position to take full advantage of the opportunities that now exist, the proposals are simply too timid.”

So, what does the health check really propose? Is it radical reform or just minor tinkering? Veena Zacharias takes a closer look.