Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is often criticized for frequent inconsistencies of its goals with the challenges of agricultural and rural development and for it being distantly oriented towards implementation of the European Union (EU) strategy. Principles of the future CAP and its realization may be elaborated only if the outcome of comprehensive area survey is duly taken into account.
The present study aims at proposing scenarios for the CAP development trends.
The below tasks are set forth for the goal achievement purposes:
- Performance of analysis on the EU CAP historical development by highlighting the problems faced during the critical development phases, ways of dealing with the encountered problems and the resulting consequences.
- Determination of advantages and disadvantages of the present CAP structure and projection of the key development trends for the 2014-2020 programming period based on the content survey.
- Fulfilment of comparative analysis of different CAP models proposed by a number of developers and comparison of attitudes of EU member states towards the CAP development perspectives. Scrutiny of the US agricultural policy structure.
- Ascertaining of the opinion of Lithuania's citizens on the provision of support to agriculture and rural development.
- Proposal of alternative CAP development trend scenarios relying on the survey results.
The study consists of an introduction, five parts, conclusions, references and an appendix. Part one distinguishes the most critical CAP development phases and includes analysis of the related problems, ways of coping with the faced problems and the resulting consequences. The said part contains the analysis of the present CAP and its measures. Content analysis enabled determination of the key problems and challenges of CAP and projection of the basic development trends. Part two presents the CAP models developed by different authors for the 2014-2020 programming period. Comparative analysis of the proposed models has lead to the detection of shortcomings to be eliminated due to elaboration of a new CAP model. Part three includes the survey of the US agricultural and rural development policy measures by highlighting the key targets, structure and development challenges, since similar problems are dealt with by both, US and EU. Part four presents the results of representative multistage opinion pools of Lithuanian citizens targeted at clarification of the population's attitude towards the significance of implementation of individual goals of CAP. Part five proposes two alternative scenarios for development of CAP trends relying on the outcome of the study results.
The study has been prepared with due consideration given to scientific publications of different authors, related legislation, statistical data, investigation results of other institutions, respective Internet web pages and other scientific fact sheets elaborated in Lithuania and abroad. The methods applied in the study are those of applied analysis, content analysis, comparative analysis, generalization, opinion pools and synthesis.
Keywords: Common Agricultural Policy, reform, agriculture, rural development.