Harmony, conflict, and evolution of the common agricultural policy in Europe : a text mining survey

Abstract

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) represents one of the main initiatives of the European Union (EU) to develop and enhance agricultural sectors. This paper applies text mining and clustering to analyse changes in the CAP's main policy objectives based on 495 legislative texts adopted by the European Parliament. We develop an SSCIR-3F analysis framework that identifies five core CAP policy concerns—food security (S), sustainability (S), competitiveness (C), farmer income (I), and rural development (R), abbreviated as SSCIR—illustrates their internal conflicts using the conflict triangle, and explains their changing importance over time using agricultural development stage theory (food, farm, and future, 3F). The text mining results show that the importance of these five dimensions has gradually shifted. Sustainability has become the most prominent dimension in recent years, followed by farmer income, food security, and rural development. Clusters of documents further support this trend, with two clusters emphasising biodiversity, ecosystems, forests, and climate change. The changing trend of budget allocation also supports our results that the major concerns of CAP have been shifting over time. Overall, the evolving SSCIR priorities indicate that the CAP is moving towards a fairer, greener, and more flexible direction.