Long - term challenges facing European Agriculture : The need for new public and private policies

will face significant challenges over the coming decades. Issues like the effects of climate change, the management of natural resources, and the constant battle to keep our food safe are altering the debate significantly. A broad vision will be needed to incorporate these different challenges into the Common Agricultural Policy and match them up with the most appropriate policies. with the support of the German Marshall Fund—held a conference on European Agriculture looking ahead to 2020. Experts from various fields contributed and discussed eight policy papers on the critical issues facing European and Global Agriculture. In 1957, the Treaty of Rome assigned five goals to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): (i) to increase productivity, (ii) to ensure a fair standard of living for farmers , (iii) to stabilize markets, (iv) to assure the availability of supplies, and (v) to ensure reasonable prices for consumers. These goals were relatively uncontentious at that time. But issues surrounding CAP have become significantly more complex. Climate change, water, and energy have joined challenges that emerged during the 1990s, such as food safety and quality. Some of these are largely the effects of human activity, for example, adjustments to changes in previous policies. Others, such as natural resource management, are imposed and/or magnified by humans, like resource misallocation or waste. Many challenges require the use of a much broader range of policies than in the past, and private as well as public sector involvement. This observation follows the lesson taken from enforcing the Treaty of Rome: the use of one policy, guaranteed production prices, to achieve the five goals of the Treaty largely explains the total or partial failure to achieve the last four CAP objectives. This brief discusses the eight papers presented at the Conference on 2020 European Agriculture, held at Sciences Po in January 2009. Two main conclusions emerge from these papers. First, one constant in all debates over long term challenges, including climate change, water, and energy is that more international trade is essential for an increase in the global resilience of agriculture. Second, better targeting of public and private policies is critical—including public policies with a budgetary dimension, such as much larger and better designed subsidies for agricultural-sector research and development. The time horizon of these three intertwined challenges is quite different. Problems related to climate change will develop over the coming century. Those related to water are increasingly pressing and …