On October 14th 2008, WWF-France and FNCIVAM (a network of French sustainable farmers) staged a conference on sustainable agriculture in Europe. While the Health Check of the CAP was laying the foundation of its future reform, the conference aimed to raise the issue of sustainable agriculture in Europe and in the world, and to consider environmental issues in the 2013 CAP reform.

At a time when dairy quotas are being phased out, the intellectual space opened by CAP 2020 allows us to think about the CAP in a ‘politically incorrect’ way. Against the dominant stream of thinking, we propose that quotas offer a potentially useful and powerful tool to deal with most of the challenges faced by the CAP.

The Agricultural Research Centre and the Estonian Ministry of Agriculture, in cooperation with three Finnish partners, organised an international conference entitled ‘Using Evaluation to Enhance the Rural Development Value of Agri-environmental Measures’ in Pärnu, Estonia, in June 2008. The aim of the conference was to bring together a range of stakeholders with an active interest in making more efficient and effective use of evaluation within the rural development policy-making cycle, notably regarding the evaluation of agri-environment measures.

Use the energy of your opponent to your own advantage. That is the beginners’ lesson in martial arts. But farm interests dug in their heels in the recent negotiations over reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and resisted pressures for change as hard as they could.