With the 2003 reform, the CAP has significantly strengthened and extended the decoupling process started ten years before. By applying the Single Farm Payment (SFP) scheme only a very small part of the financial support to agriculture can remain coupled to production. Decoupling brings about a substantial abandonment of the traditional CAP objectives, but is questionable its effectiveness in driving farmer choices towards the fulfilment of present social and policy goals.

Some experts and opinion makers judge the last reform as an important step for liquidating the traditional support to agriculture; others consider the reform able to provide the necessary condition to rebuild European agricultural policy according to new policy objectives and social concerns. The formers think decoupling makes financial support more vulnerable to EU budgetary constraints and financial requirements carried out by the Lisbon strategy. The latter highlight mandatory cross compliance and the strenghtening of the second pillar as the emergent characters of a new policy. Liquidation vs. rebuilding of the CAP? An answer will be provided by the future decisions on CAP reform. However, the recent reform proposals for some Common Market Organizations, the ongoing process of technical and political simplification and the “health check” scheduled for 2008, will all contribute to draw the new CAP after 2013.

A prominent character of the 2003 reform has been the marked “renationalisation” of the domestic implementation of CAP. Reformed support schemes provide several policy options with significant distributional implications. Member States have been offered the possibility to link financial support to specific features of their agricultural sector and to target CAP benefits towards selected beneficiaries.

National choices, even in a strongly decoupled frame, might affect the “equal treatment between farmers” as well as “market and competition” equilibria. What is the real economic and political meaning for “equal treatment between farmers” as well as for “market and competition”?  How are such concerns related to the specific CAP objectives and which is their impact on CAP reform decisions?

Future scenarios of agricultural policies in EU will be appreciably affected by the Member state choices in implementing the Fischler reform. Those choices will add up further constraints in the next CAP reform negotiations. The analysis of national choices could help to understand the nature, role and governance of future agricultural policies. Relevant policy choices to investigate are, for example: common policy vs. national/local policies? expenditure policy vs. regulatory policy? sector policy vs. territorial integrated policy?