Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

"Farmers in Brussels: Agricultural Interest Groups and the Common Agricultural Policy, 1967-1992"

Final Report Summary - AGRIREFORM (Farmers in Brussels: Agricultural Interest Groups and the Common Agricultural Policy, 1967-1992)

The project enquired into the role and influence of organized farm interest to explore and explain the striking lack of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) prior to 1992. Legally established by the Treaty of Rome of 1957, the CAP is the oldest, most contested, yet still most important public policy of today’s European Union (EU). Already at the end of the 1960s, overproduction – the infamous butter mountains and wine lakes – resulted in a steep rise in agricultural expenditures. The costly nature of the policy represented a strong incentive for reforming it. The European Commission made repeated attempts to adjust the CAP from the late 1960s onward; but it took until 1992 until the first major change was agreed and implemented with the so-called MacSharry reform.
In integrating the analysis of the political organisation and articulation of the socio-economic interests of farmers with that of the evolution of agriculture as a crucial EC policy field, the project focused on the dominant national interest groups in France (Fédération nationales des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles, FNSEA), Germany (Deutscher Bauernverband, DBV), Great Britain (National Farmers’ Union, NFU), and the Netherlands (Katholieke Nederlandse Boeren- en Tuinderbond, KNBTB) and their two, largest and oldest, transnationally-constituted umbrella organisations, the Comité des organisations professionnelles agricoles (COPA) and its sister-organization, the Confédération générale des coopératives agricoles (COGECA).
To explore how and why these farm organizations were able to prevent a reform of the CAP for a period of 25 years, the project investigated firstly whether, how and to what extent farm interests and their organized representation became increasingly Europeanised in response to European policy changes and attempts at reform by the Commission. Europeanisation was understood in this context as the establishment of EC-level organizational structures as a response to the transfer of competences in agricultural policy to the European level and the transfer of ideas as a result of increased transnational exchanges, entanglements and cooperation. Although member states and national farm interest groups clearly had played a major role in the creation of the CAP in the 1960s, farmers were well organized transnationally by the end of the decade. The project thus traced the institutional and ideational Europeanisation of agricultural interests through a detailed analysis of the intra- and inter-organizational changes that farm organisations underwent and the associated redefinition of their preferences in European rather than in purely national terms. It illustrated how, with the Comité des organisations professionnelles agricoles (COPA), founded in 1958, farmers had set up what appeared to be an effective structure for coordinating national positions into a common stance, formulating shared CAP discourses and lobbying the European institutions, and in particular the Commission.
In analysing the impact of these changes on farmers’ strategies for collective action, the project examined secondly to what extent the representation of farm interests increasingly took place in “Brussels”, at the supranational level. Clearly, farm interest groups continued to lobby national governments in order to influence policy decisions as regular street protests of farmers in the member states demonstrate. However, they successfully developed and used the European route of lobbying, alongside the national route, to defend the status quo against repeated reform attempts and to ensure the maintenance of high level subsidies and social protection for European farmers. Moreover, in spite of the Commission’s resistance to institutionalize contacts, COPA-COGECA repeatedly sought out to Europeanizing of the neo-corporatist system of interest representation, characterized by formal and informal ties among farm interest groups, agricultural ministers and political parties, to which its members had become accustomed at the national level. Farm interest groups also increasingly transnationalized their collective action with protests organized domestically but also in Brussels and used their national and Community-level interest groups to selectively target a variety of institutional actors.
To analyse how these organisations wielded power collectively to prevent CAP reform, the project focused on two case studies of agricultural commodities, cereals and milk, which were characterized by problems of overproduction since the early years of the CAP. The two case studies provided substantial evidence for why and how the national and Community-level farmers’ organisations managed to thwart radical reforms by the Commission during the 25 year period leading up to the MacSharry reform. They moreover provided important insights into the gradual erosion of the farmers’ lobbying power.
The completion of the project relied upon the consultation of a broad range of archives and other sources in order to collect the empirical evidence necessary for the analysis. These archives included sources from national farm groups and their interactions with agricultural ministries and COPA-COGECA, for instance records of the British National Farmers Union (NFU), which are held by the Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading, the records of the British Ministry of Agriculture and of the Milk Marketing Board at the National Archives in Kew Gardens/London; documents from the German Deutscher Bauernverband (DBV), the German Chancellery and the German Ministry of Agriculture, all deposited in the Federal Archives in Coblenz, as well as the papers of the French president’s advisers in agricultural matters at the National Archives in Paris. Research was also conducted in the archives of the Dutch Katholieke Nederlandse Boeren- en Tuinderbond (KNBTB) deposited at the Katholiek Documentatie Centrum in Nijmegen and at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam that holds the private papers of the first Agriculture Commissioner, Sicco Mansholt, who was among others the initiator of the first reform proposal of the CAP. The project also drew upon archival sources from the private archives of the COPA-COGECA in Brussels and sources from the European institutions, in particular the Historical Archives of the European Commission in Brussels for the records of the Directorate General Agriculture (VI), and the Historical Archives of the European Union in Florence, which holds a number of private papers of European civil servants. A limited number of semi-structured interviews with key representatives of farm groups and Commission officials and with select experts provided more personal insights into the influence exerted by organised farm groups that could not be uncovered in the documentary sources.
With its in-depth multi-archival and interdisciplinary analysis of the historical role of farm interest groups as influential societal actors in the development of the CAP, the project findings provide historical insights into issues of contemporary importance. In particular, they make an important contribution to clarifying how and to what extent the emergent European political system has been able to balance the interests of a particular socio-economic group, the farmers, which disposed of a cohesive Europe-wide network and various channels of influence, with the wider interests of the Community and those of other less well-organized societal actors. Such knowledge is of broader interest and relevance to policy-makers, practitioners and stakeholders since transnational collective action has become a key form of EU lobbying over the past decades and contributes to a significant extent to the shaping of the multi-level and multi-channel political system of the present-day EU.