Commercial and political influences on dental health: 1. The effect of agricultural policies

Agricultural policy is only one of a number of factors influencing the cost and availability of agricultural products. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Economic Community (EEC) was devised principally to improve rural prosperity, not to improve the health of those people in the EEC. In order to do this it is necessary to control agricultural prices against the vagaries of world market prices by a complex system of target prices, import levies, intervention prices, storage of excess produce and export subsidies. In the case of sugar, this is further complicated by an undertaking to purchase an agreed amount annually from Commonwealth countries. The effect of this is, for example, to raise the price of sugar in the EEC above world prices and therefore to reduce consumption, possibly by as much as ten per cent. This situation is not likely to last indefinitely, and a drop in sugar prices and therefore a rise in sugar consumption is to be expected in the present decade.