Global Overview of the CAP. Part I: Short Food Supply Chain as a Missing Concept

This Chapter aims to address the question: ‘What is the relevance of conducting a legal analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) targeting SFSCs and small farmers throughout its reforms?’. The answer lies in the need to trace the emergence of the SFSC concept from the early phases of the CAP. Observing its evolution throughout the CAP reforms is essential to understand how changes in the CAP’s objectives and trajectories have impacted the regulation of SFSCs over the years. The answer requires a closed examination of the CAP, spanning from its inception to 2003, laying the grounds for a more in-depth analysis of the latest reforms (2013 and 2023), as discussed in Chap. 5 . By mapping the presence or, more aptly, the lack of measures targeting small farmers and SFSCs within the original CAP and its first reforms, this analysis demonstrates that despite shifts in the conceptualisation of agriculture, the enduring values of the CAP—particularly the emphasis on increasing production and ensuring food security—persisted as central focuses of agricultural legislation. The Chapter concludes that due to historical reasons, as well as CAP’s core objectives and fundamental principles, small farmers and SFSCs initiatives have no place in the original architecture of the CAP, at least until the early 2000s. This changed when a new role was attributed to rural areas, and the concept of ‘multifunctionality’ was attributed to agriculture.