How Agricultural Sustainability Entered Into the European Treaties

There is now widespread awareness that sustainability is a multifaceted concept. All too often articulated solely in its climatic and environmental dimension, its richness extends beyond the classic tripartite understanding more thoughtfully attributed to it: environmental, economic, and social. Both at the international level and within the European Treaties, food security has always represented an objective and a value strongly interconnected with that of sustainability – whether because of the environmental consequences of agricultural productivism, for several decades regarded as necessary to safeguard food security, or because of the social dimension of agriculture and its products, on which the capacity of a population to be self-sustaining depends. From the Treaty of Rome onwards, not by chance, the construction of the CAP placed at its centre an idea of ‘development of agricultural production’ which, on the one hand, was to take place on the basis of a criterion of ‘rationality’ and, on the other, to guarantee a fair standard of living for the population and reasonable prices for consumers, thereby ensuring social stability and adequate purchasing power. It is within this legal framework of the CAP’s foundational principles that, at a certain historical juncture, the environmental objective also came to be explicitly incorporated. This ‘epochal’ shift, however, did not amount to a genuine ‘genetic’ transformation of the CAP, which, by virtue of the ‘rational’ configuration that the Treaties have always imposed upon it as an essential characteristic, possessed from the outset a ‘sustainable’ profile, such as to preclude, long before the explicit invocation of ‘sustainability’, any choices liable to jeopardise food self-sufficiency, social stability, and access to food for future generations.