With the paper "Enlargement and Agriculture - Successfully Integration the New Member States into the CAP" (January 2002), the Commission has outlined for the first time in greater detail how and to what extent payments of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should be implemented in Central and Eastern Europe Countries (CEECs). The paper claims that enlargement can be financed under the agreed financial guidelines for the overall CAP while at the same time safeguarding the needs of social and structural developments. In contrast to this result several previous studies have shown before that enlarging the CAP for an EU of 25 members would either require cost saving reforms or stronger regionalisation. Sceptical reactions to the Commission's paper were also refering to the short time horizon of the calculations - reaching only to 2006; the true problems might have been delayed to later years. Based on scenarios for different commodities, this discussion paper continues calculations up to 2013. The results make clear that the Commission's plan indeed can be sustained beyond the year 2006. Howeve, sensitivity tests make clear how tight the Commission's proposals are and that there is neither room for better negotiation results for the new Member States, not for any further costly changes in the CAP. Moreover, it is crucial that the world market situation remains as favorable as it was in recent years for EU agriculture.
