Agricultural protection and support in the European Economic Community, 1962-92: rent-seeking or welfare policy?

The European Economic Community's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has found a lot of scholarly attention. While economists stress the irrationality of the CAP and explain its striking persistence by rent-seeking behavior, a prominent interpretation among historians is that the CAP should be interpreted as welfare policy for farm households. I subject the latter hypothesis for the period 1962–92 to an empirical test and find that the combined benefits from subsidies, import protection, and political prices gave much more benefits to European agriculture than any welfare policy could have achieved. If one still wants to find arguments legitimizing the political rents (or part of them) that agriculture received through the CAP one has to consider non-economic arguments (food security in the Cold War) or external effects (protection of the environment or landscape).