Green Deal: Beyond a New Era of Agricultural Exceptionalism?

The European Commission launched the new strategy for the Union to mitigate the effects of climate change and once again agriculture is among the most important arrows in the quiver of the policy maker to meet this challenge. For years, the so-called vision of "agricultural exceptionalism" has marked the trajectory of new policies for the sector. If from 2010 a setback was expected with the arrival of a "post-exceptionalist" era (Greer, 2017), today, with the ambitious challenges proposed by the Green Deal and related strategies such as farm to fork and biodiversity, agricultural exceptionalism returns to be at the center of the European political framework. The exceptionalism of the agricultural sector and the importance attribuited by European policy makers have led to the sedimentation of institutional infrastructures and networks that have favoured the defence of sectoral interests (Skogstad 1998). During the years, the CAP reforms have brought only incremental and not radical transformations (Greer, 2013) aimed at promoting the transition from a productivist and protectionist policy to a more market and environmentally sensitive intervention model (Burrel, 2006). This aspect has been central in the rhetorical construction that accompanied the whole long reform process towards the new CAP 2021-2027, highlighting how wide is the gap that prevents the CAP from being strongly integrated with European environmental policy, despite the most distorting part of European support to the agricultural sector has been definitively reduced and it is evident that the environmental commitments of CAP beneficiaries have grown over time. The aim of this paper is to analyse the changes in the CAP history in order to clarify the framework in which the debate on the evolution of agricultural exceptionalism takes place.