CAP Reforms and Multilateral Trade Negotiations: Another View on Discourse Efficiency

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was institutionalised in the early 1960s and has gone through various crises since then, which have led to increasingly important policy reforms (1981, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1999 and 2002/3).1 This article focuses on two of these reforms: (i) the so-called MacSharry reform in 1992, which introduced a radical shift in the type of policy instruments used (from price support for agricultural products to direct payments to farmers); and (ii) the CAP Mid-Term Review (MTR), signed in June 2003, which resulted from an attempt by the European Commission to introduce a second generation of radical instrumental changes in the CAP in order to enhance the 'multifunctional' dimension of EU agriculture. First, the article analyses the Commission discourses in each period as well as the conditions of their formulation. Second, it seeks to explain the active political entrepreneurship and much higher profile adopted by the Commission to promote the MTR reform project as compared to the MacSharry reform. The analytical framework employed here considers discourse as a resource in political exchange and hypothesises that an actor's ability to influence policy change through an efficient and influential discourse relies heavily on the amount and quality of intellectual resources available.