In October 2010, the European Commission (EC) published a Communication to inform the institutional debate and prepare the ground for the legal proposals adopted a year later in October 2011. This identified three challenges that the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should respond to: food security; environment and climate change; and territorial balance.

In line with these challenges, this paper examines how various stakeholders try to influence how the CAP can enable the EU to tackle food security and the provision of environmental public goods. These two were chosen because they can be defined in various ways by different stakeholders, thus reflecting their values and interests in relation to what they believe the CAP should set out to do.