EU Agricultural and Rural Development Policies Vis-à-Vis the Ecological Crisis

The paper critically analyzes the trajectories of EU agricultural and rural policies, exploring their link to the economic, social, and environmental crises of the last few decades and drawing a balance of their outcomes. In doing so, the authors focus on ongoing patterns of agrarian change shedding light on the complex and multifaceted features of the European agri-food system, as characterized by the hybridization of diverse agricultural models and non-linear processes of rural differentiations. In this respect, EU agricultural and rural development policies, within the context of the ‘corporate-environmental food regime’, have played a key role. In particular, the article makes the point that the various attempts to reform EU agriculture and provide responses to the ecological crisis have produced an ‘institutional ambiguity’, which, in turn, reflects a range of unresolved tensions and conflicts underpinning the EU agri-food system, where discourses about sustainability are contended among actors with divergent interests and vision of rural development. Against this background, new general tendencies are emerging entailing both risk and opportunities for the building of a more sustainable EU agri-food system.