Controversies Over the European Value Added Created by CAP

Abstract

From the beginning of the financial crisis – 2008/2009 – the EU entered an unprecedented period of very serious shocks. These problems first affected the economy (weak and highly variable growth with times of rather shallow recession, high unemployment, especially among young people) and then they spread to the bank sector and the national budgets. Consequently, several of the old EU countries, belonging to the euro area, became – in fact – insolvent. To make the matters worse, southern Europe was hit by a huge wave of immigration, Russians took over the Crimea, a war erupted in Donbas and Donald Trump, who can considerably weaken the NATO, won the US presidential elections. The subsequent attempts at solving these mini-crises were often delayed, not very daring and erratic. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the crisis, ultimately, started to affect also the sociopolitical and institutional areas, which is manifested in growing distrust of the Europeans in the Community institutions and liberal democracy. This, in turn, resulted in widespread populism, national and regional egoism and disintegration tendencies. Brexit is one of the first effects of the process along with the concerns that other members of the EU may take similar decisions which would be tantamount to its breakup. In these circumstances, convincing validation of further existence and development of the Community requires great intellectual, political and organisational effort, and then finding effective channels to reach as broad as possible circle of responsible citizens with the proposals, recommendations and ready application solutions to help them regain trust in the meaning of the European project and possibilities of functioning in the double national and European identity. It would be perfect to make the mended EU more democratic, i.e. to actively engage in the process the very Europeans and not only techno- and Eurocrats. One of the more interesting concepts, at the moment, seems to be the European added value, which – in a nutshell, means a sum of extra benefits obtained on account of integration against the effects resulting from the national socio-economic policy. It is possible to describe this value and, to some extent, even to quantify it for all areas of the European integration. However, the paper is restricted only to the CAP, focusing on methodological, environmental and climate, innovation and investment issues, and a set of key budget problems.

Keywords: European Added Value, agricultural finance, environmental and climate policy, Common Agricultural Policy