Eurobarometer on the Common Agriculture Policy

Europeans want a CAP that guarantees good quality, healthy and safe food (59%) at a reasonable price (49%). Protecting the environment and ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers (both 41%) were both high priorities indicated by the survey.

In general, the public considers agriculture and rural environment as essential for Europe’s future and CAP was generally viewed as performing fairly well when it comes to securing food supply in the EU, ensuring that agricultural products are of good quality, healthy and safe and favouring greener production methods such as organic farming.

CAP has been criticised for not protecting family farms, ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers, ensuring reasonable food prices, protection of the environment, dealing with climate change and the development of rural areas while preserving the countryside.

The survey indicates that the majority of Europeans are in favour of CAP’s new aims:
 to help farmers meet the challenges arising from climate change;
 to become more market-oriented;
 to allocate support more fairly;
 to make it conditional on compliance with environmental standards;
 to maintain the countryside and to develop the rural economy

Support for agricultural policy is accompanied by a general preference for the policy to be conducted at European level. The majority of people interviewed (66%) consider the CAP budget to be either adequate or insufficient.

The survey was carried out between 13 November and 9 December 2009 by TNS Opinion commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development. According to the Eurobarometer method, a thousand individual interviews were conducted in each of the twenty-seven Member States of the European Union.

For more information: EC Press release Europeans, Agriculture and the Common Agricultural Policy