INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC DAYS 2008

Enright, P.

The EU's Common Agricultural Policy Rural Development Pillar: An appraisal

Anotácia:
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been the most significant and influential policy for the agricultural sector and for rural areas in the EU. In the 1980s, it became clear that the heretofore sectoral focus of the CAP was inadequate to address the needs of rural Europe and to the changing needs of society. Thus began a sequence of reforms that led to the emergence of a second rural development pillar. This aspect of EU policy is assessed in this paper. The second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has emerged out of the development and reform of the Common Agricultural Policy especially since the early 1990s. Essentially, it is not a new policy, but rather a policy and has been adapted and developed out of the existing CAP. The measures which make up the current rural development policy of the CAP were mainly introduced during the 1990s, and a few have even earlier origins in the 1970s and 80s. The basic menu of measures under the current Regulation brings together the former CAP accompanying measures and a range of rural development and farm structures aids from former Structural fund programmes. Partly as a result of its mixed origins, rural development under the CAP is rather a hybrid concept and a function of different reforms. Thus it supports a range of actions that traditionally would not have been considered as 'rural development'. As a result the content and scope of measures in rural development under CAP are limited. At the same time important rural development issues such as infrastructural development and social cohesion are not addressed directly under Pillar II.

Abstract: