The agriculture of the European Union has been facing many challenges, including issues such as growing world population, changing lifestyles and diet, price volatility, economic slowdown and the new market environment, climate change, environmental degradation and various rural and local problems. In order to meet these challenges, the latest CAP reform introduced a number of new instruments, including, inter alia, the new (and greened) system of direct payments, the support of small farms, the active farmer concept, the revised system of endorsing producer organisations, the risk management toolkit, the Common Strategic Framework, new priorities for rural development as well as EIP programmes.

Four years have passed since the introduction of these new instruments and in line with the mid-term-review of the CAP, it is time for evaluating them in light of the latest data and experience available. Have these new instruments proved to be efficient? How flexible member states were to implement them? What are the lessons learned with the new policies of the first and second pillar? Have economic, environmental and social challenges been met by these new instruments? The seminar aims to answer these questions by exchanging knowledge and ideas on the efficiency of the new CAP policy instruments.

The seminar well fits into the growing debate on the future of the CAP after 2020, which has already started. On the one hand, several political and NGO documents have recently been published on various dimensions of the CAP, including background papers of the Dutch and French government together with the Cork 2.0 Rural Development Declaration and the European Commission’s 2017 working programme. On the other hand, several think tanks and researchers have published a number of documents on the future of the CAP, including the various reports and studies commissioned by the European Parliament.