Europos Sąjungos bendrosios žemės ūkio politikos reforma: priežastys, sunkumai, perspektyva

Abstract

This Master thesis aims to analyse the reform of the European Union (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The analysis of the CAP reform was made in accordance with a consideration of its reasons, difficulties and perspective that help to prove a brought up hypothesis. The hypothesis of this work is that the EU CAP reform and its new formed objects help to adjust the markets of agricultural food products and also are able to successfully fulfill the goals of the CAP and raise new initiatives of the further changes. Several tasks are being solved to achieve the aim of this work. Firstly, there is reviewed the formation process of the EU CAP, its main goals, principles and the main market mechanisms. Secondly, there is theoretically generalised the main reasons of the CAP reform. There are marked out the following reasons: overproduction, the growing expenses of the EU budget, inefficient support of the EU farmers, problems related to nature protection and the external pressure of the GATT Uruguay Round. Thirdly, there is analysed the evolution of the main 1992 reform which is known as MacSharry reform and there are evaluated its main goals. There is also presented the continuation of the MacSharry reform – “Agenda 2000” and its new initiatives of the further CAP reconstructions. Moreover, there are revealed the main difficulties of the CAP reform: political obstacles and a strong influence of lobbies, long and complex CAP decision-making process and different attitude of some state members of the EU to the CAP reformation. Furthermore, there is discussed the CAP future perspective. The obtained results are summarized at the end of the research study. There are also presented recommendations for the further CAP reform. The raised hypothesis of this work is found to be true.