European Interest Groups and the CAP

From a description of the main federations of interest groups dealing with the CAP various reasons for the greater influence of the food and farm lobbies vis à vis their consumer counterparts emerge. In part these explanations relate to organisational factors such as the size of budgets and amount of personnel, the incentives to lobby, the similarity of members' preferences, and so on, but the closer, more intricate relationship between the farm lobbies and EC institutions is also important.