The Common Agricultural Policy is dead: long live the BAP

We have had 45 years of the Common Agricultural Policy. What will the BAP (British Agricultural Policy) look like? Richard Byrne (Harper Adams University) looks at how the CAP outgrew its original purpose of ensuring food security to become a wider land management programme. In fact, it was the UK's 1986 Agricultural Act that led the way in agri-environmental policy. A successful BAP must take in the needs of the whole rural economy, not just food production.