ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have described the process of agricultural policy reform over the decade of the 1990s. Significant changes have occurred in entrenched policies that warrant the label of reform. One important question that one must ask of the recent policy changes in the industrial countries, in particular in the EU and the US, is whether the reforms are "permanent" or just the latest twist in the endless saga of these programs. If a policy change is merely a short term expedient masquerading as reform, the tendency will be to revert to type as soon as conditions allow. Will farm policies in the EU and the US in, say, ten years time look like an evolution of the current reformed policies, or will they resemble the policies of the early and mid 1980s? Should current policies be thought of as the latest variant of the old entitlement approach to farm programs, based on the old paradigm of a Dependent Agriculture? Or are they the manifestation of the Competitive Agriculture paradigm, which takes the government out of supporting commodity prices and making farming decisions, and where necessary "buys out" the political obligation to commodity and farm groups. Or will the Multifunctional Agriculture paradigm come to prevail, with agriculture the guardian of the countryside, rewarded for environmental services as much as the production of raw material for the food industry? Or perhaps there are new paradigms emerging, that focus on the farm sector as an integral part of a global food chain, where national boundaries are an inconvenience and support programs an irrelevance; or that link the choice of food consumed to the environment in a holistic way so that lifestyles and farming practices become intertwined in a "new age" awareness of the cultural significance of food.
