Reducing the sauce: Distilment of EU Common agricultural policy discourses as a result of new actors and drivers (2015-2022)

This contribution explores the changes in discourses applied by different institutional actors relevant to the European Union Common agricultural policy between the European Commission's reform proposal in 2017 and the adoption of the final legislative texts in 2022. The aim of the contribution is to elucidate the final content of the reform in terms of objectives, allocation of funding and interventions, by demonstrating that the discourse of crucial actors gradually changed in the observed period, and by linking these changes to crucial breaking points during the reform process and the drivers behind them. These include rising environmental concerns, the election of the new parliament in 2019 and subsequent adoption of the European Green deal, Brexit, US trade wards and the Russia-Ukraine war. Based on critical discourse analysis of texts and statements issued by key institutional and interest players, including analysis of micro- and macro-propositions, we argue that there is a discernible shift in the main discourses and underlying ideologies applied under the CAP, from the traditional three (productivist, neoliberal and multifunctional) to a more binary constellation of productivism and environmentalism, with neoliberalism quietly fading into the background. This may have important immediate repercussions for intra- and extra-EU agricultural policy, production and trade.