The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the EU’s oldest policies, and is a cornerstone of European cooperation. After more than a decade of post-World War II food shortages and hunger, CAP was originally intended to increase agricultural production, ensure food security, protect farmers’ quality of life and stabilize markets while maintaining reasonable prices for consumers. As the EU has grown, the scope has expanded to include such issues as environmental development and pollution, rural development, land management, animal welfare, and farmer training. Introduced in 1962, CAP recently adopted the latest in a series of reforms meant to take the EU from 2014 to 2020.

EU expenditure on the CAP amounts to almost 40 percent of the entire EU budget. In line with the 2014 International Year of Family Farming, much of the focus of this reform is on family-owned and operated farms. While small farms are usually also family farms, not all family farms are small. Still, family farms account for 95 percent of all farms in the EU. Small farms under two hectares (five acres) represent approximately half of all 12.2 million farms across the EU.

These six million farms produce on a fraction (2.5 percent) of the total land area farmed in the EU. At the same time, over half the farmland is worked by the very small fraction (2.7 percent) of large farms (over 100 hectares or 247 acres). Because CAP support has historically been linked to acreage with more intensive production, the larger farms have tended to receive the lion’s share of funding.