The Lisbon Strategy for social inclusion and the Common Agricultural Policy (Strategia di Lisbona per l'inclusione sociale e politica agricola comune: un esempio della difficile coerenza tra azioni di policy europee)

This paper represents a first attempt to evaluate the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the most relevant EU policy in financial terms, on social inclusion, one of the most important issues included in the Lisbon Strategy, launched by the EU in 2000. To do so, the paper focuses on how the various CAP measures have affected rural poverty in the EU and tries to identify the elements of congruence and conflict between the CAP and social inclusion goals. Market-oriented actions seem to exacerbate differences between rich and poor farmers, because they tend to favour those areas where agriculture is already more competitive. By contrast, rural development measures may be more helpful, even if they are still not adequately financed and pose some problems in terms of governance. The new 2007-2013 programming cycle brings some positive innovations, but synergies between the CAP and social inclusion could be more fully exploited.