Regional paths to the fruit and vegetable common market organisation : structural and financial impact of the European common agricultural policy in Provence, the Delta of Po and Peloponnese (1957-1972)

Abstract

The European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) exerted a tangible impact in the farming landscapes of the European Economic Community between 1957 and 1972. This thesis shows that CAP’s competition laws and especially its liberalised fruit and vegetable exports in the Common Market transformed the productive assets of three agricultural regions of France, Italy and Greece. Unlike cereals or dairy products, the European Commission did not pay price guarantees, but instead introduced a system of quality categories. The CAP quality criteria provided higher purchase prices for enhanced varieties, mainly originating from the United States. These commercial varieties encouraged intensive plantations, thus triggering structural changes in the farming activities of the regions. Overall, this thesis contends that regions entered a tug-of-war between the plea of modernising cropping systems according to the CAP quality criteria and that of assuring welfare benefits for cooperating owners of small plots or increasing numbers of seasonal workers. More frequently after 1966, intensive farming created periodical crises of overproduction. The management of unsold surpluses gradually became the dominant pattern of how the CAP policymaking proceeded in the regions. The analysis portrays these rising antinomies in the province of Provence (France), the Delta of the river Po (Italy) and the provinces of Peloponnese (Greece) through three policy areas. First, it examines the regional wholesale markets in their trend to centralise production and dislodge smaller, local markets. Secondly, it shifts the attention to the evolution of the producer associations, on which the CAP policymakers had initially counted to organise fruit and vegetable processing for small-scale farmers in the EEC. The study concludes that these associations, usually under the form of cooperatives, turned into deposits of structural surpluses and distributors of the European subsidies (primes) that their adherents received to withdraw their unsold production. Thirdly, the study considers that, since 1965, the European FEOGA Guidance funds for the amelioration of agricultural infrastructures were trifling. Furthermore, they lacked a holistic program for integrating local infrastructures that were put at the service of cooperative farmers. In measuring these repercussions, the thesis concludes that the Mansholt Memorandum and its shift towards rural development (1968-1972) was a continuum rather than a reform of the CAP. It was, in other words, a result of the CAP’s previous ‘path dependencies’ on market, cooperative and structural policies.