They are as follows:
· To increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress and by ensuring the rational development of agricultural production and the optimum utilization of all factors of production, in particular labour.
· To ensure there by a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.
· To stabilize markets.
· To provide certainty of supplies.
· To ensure supplies to consumers at reasonable prices.

To be able to achieve the objectives of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Member States came together in a conference in Stresa in 1958, and decided the three underlying principles of the CAP:
· A single agricultural market, whereby products move freely between Member States, and a common frontier exists for goods imported into the EU. Also common sanitary and veterinary regulations, common prices and common competition rules to mention but a few.
· Community preference, which is the price advantage granted to EU produce. The prices of agricultural products within the EU have traditionally been higher than those on the world market. Therefore, to achieve this principle, custom duties have been imposed on imported agricultural products to bring them closer to EU prices. In parallel, export refunds have compensated the difference between EU prices and those on the international market and have thus helped European products remain competitive.
· Financial solidarity, according to which all Member States contribute to the costs and share the benefits of the CAP.

In the light of these principles, the main mechanisms of the CAP were created between 1960 and 1962. These mechanisms are still in place today.
Firstly, there are the Common Market Organisations, or CMOs. These are not organisations of people, but of the regulations that cover the different sectors of production. Their purpose is to support the markets through appropriate mechanisms that vary according to the product covered. Initially, a CMO was set up for approximately half of the agricultural products. This number has progressively grown, and today we have a CMO for all products except potatoes, honey and certain spirits.

Secondly, there is the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund, or EAGGF, the agricultural budget, a necessary corollary of the principle of financial solidarity. It is a portion of the total budget of the EU, and is used to finance all the expenses of the CAP and certain expenses for rural development measures. Now I’ m just going to focus on the Common Market Organisations, in another point we will explain the FEOGA. We can find two classifications to explain the mechanism of the COM:

COM classification by support mechanism
Changes in the aims and means of organising the markets resulting from the 1992 and 1999 reforms have changed the design of the COMs, which may now be classified in five categories according to the support mechanisms they use. 1. COMs with guaranteed prices and automatic intervention
These apply to sugar and dairy products, affecting just over one fifth of Community final production. Minimum or guaranteed prices are paid to farmers by public intervention agencies in exchange for delivery of their products, where market prices are too low. 2.