You will be forgiven for wondering why things have been a little on the quiet side here at CAPHealthCheck.eu over the past couple of months. For my part, besides some intensive behind-the-scenes work at farmsubsidy.org and and exciting new EU budget transparency project that’s still under wraps, I’ve been blogging more on the EU budget than on the CAP, mostly over at FollowTheMoney.eu. Among the other leading contributors to this website, Wyn Grant has been on a fact-finding visit to Australia and Alan Matthews has been attending to his teaching responsibilities as well as working away on his forthcoming magnum opus on the CAP and global development. Fear not, we will be back in the saddle soon enough, but while things are running at a little below full capacity, you might want to take a look over at an excellent new website/blog called CAP2020: Debating the future of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Edited by Martin Farmer at the Institute for European Environment Policy, CAP2020 brings together a wide range of experts offering expert analysis on the future of European farm policy, with a particular emphasis on environmental issues. Alongside the latest on the Less Favoured Areas consultation and debate over the French government’s recent reorientation of its farm policies there are useful briefings on the new lexicon of the CAP, what the EU budget review means for the future of the CAP (including a useful country-by-country summary of national positions on the EU budget).
Perhaps most innovative is a series of reform profiles of member states. These briefings provide an introductory overview of the agriculture of each member state and offer some analysis of the government’s recent positions on the issue of CAP reform. The authors of the briefings are all knowledgeable experts on their respective countries. The people behind CAP2020 obviously understand that the real debate over the future of the CAP will not be played out in Brussels or Strasbourg but between national capitals and their competing visions of food and farm policy.
For those who like to take their CAP updates by RSS (and who doesn’t?) there is a feed here:
http://cap2020.ieep.eu/feed/atom.xml
