Since the early 1990s reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were increasingly motivated by developments in the farm trade negotiations in the GATT and WTO. These led to gradual policy changes in which policy instruments were altered to limit their trade distorting impact. This reflected a de-compartmentalisation of EU agricultural policy making but not in form of trade policy actors penetrating the agricultural policy community. Rather, the policy changes were adopted in the shadow of EU trade policy. In December 2008 the Doha Round stalled. This situation allows a quasi-experimental research design in which the explanatory variable, WTO pressure, can be varied to test its impact on the reform direction of the CAP. This paper shows that the decrease of WTO pressure in the 2013 reform enabled policy reversal in which international trade policy concerns were downgraded. This may reflect a re-compartmentalisation of EU agricultural policy making
