It’s now 30 years since the last really fundamental recasting of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.

It was in the MacSharry reforms of the early 1990s that the system of guaranteed prices for European farm produce based on European costs of production was swept away. Guaranteed prices, especially in the case of cereals and beef, were reduced by 30%.

Ray MacSharry’s reforms brought in layers of bewildering bureaucracy, which were simplified by Commissioner Franz Fischler in the early 2000s, but the principle remained – a broad realignment of Europe’s farm prices, with world prices with limited compensation for price reductions coming by way land-based premiums.

These compensatory payments have been gradually whittled away in favour of environmental and “obligatory good practice” payments, all financed from the same budget.

I remember well when, many years ago, during an interview with the principle author of the CAP, Sicco Mansholt, the then-Commissioner for Agriculture, commented that European farm prices could never be at ordinary world prices, because there were regions of the world (he even then explicitly mentioned South America) that would, for climatic and scale reasons, be able to produce more cheaply than Europe would.

He said that it was up to the European economy and its politicians to ensure that Europe’s citizens, including its social welfare recipients, were able to afford European produced food.

We have travelled a long route since then, where food is now a matter of trade policy and negotiations, rather than an essential staple of the Common Agricultural Policy. Will we see a change?

The next UN climate summit is to be held next month in Dubai.

For the first time, food security is to be on the agenda. Ireland will be fully represented and should put down a marker that it will be pressing for fundamental change in Europe’s approach to food production.

With the emergence of Brazil and Russia, the food world has fundamentally changed.