1. Agricultural Policies And Change

2. The European Union The European Union is made up of 15 member countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Irish Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK.). It began as a group of only 6 countries in 1957 and has expanded ever since. Border controls between the countries are virtually non-existent now, and trade is almost exclusively between the 15 countries. The EU has brought in many rules and regulations to try and help farmers in all of its member countries. Not all of these have been as eagerly welcomed as they might have been.

3. The Common Agricultural Policy This was a policy brought in by the EU in 1962 with a number of aims: It aimed to increase agricultural production in member countries. It aimed to improve the standard of living experienced by farmers. It aimed to maintain prices and supplies of food at a reasonable cost to the consumers. Some of the methods that it used included subsidies and minimum pricing. Farmers were encouraged to produce as much as they could, and the EU guaranteed that it would buy it all. This led to huge surpluses in butter, milk, cereals and even wine.

4. Reformation Minimum Pricing / Price Guarantees: The Common Agricultural Policy established minimum prices for agricultural produce that the farmer was guaranteed to receive. They also set prices lower than those of imports from outside the EU and bought up any products that were falling in price in an attempt to boost prices again. The idea was to allow the farmers to always get a reasonable price for their product.

5. Reformation Quotas: In 1992 the Common Agricultural Policy was reformed and one of the main things that was brought in was quotas. These set a limit on how much one farmer could produce of a single product, thus protecting the livelihoods of many farmers by continuing to guarantee their crops would be bought, whilst not building up the huge surpluses that occurred before.

6. Reformation Subsidies: Subsidies were given to farmers to allow them to produce more crops. However the intensive farming methods that most farmers employed led to many environmental problems such as hedgerow removal and increased use of pesticides and fertilisers. The 1992 changes to the policy removed much of the subsidies and price support that the original policy had, as the EU realised that the intensive farming was harming the environment.

7. Reformation Surpluses: The original CAP didn't limit how much each farmer could produce, it just bought all that they had. This rapidly led to the establishment of huge surpluses in many agricultural products, such as beef, butter, cereals, milk and wine. However in the 1992 reform of the policy they realised that this idea was not working and so introduced quotas.