International audience Southern and Eastern Mediterranean countries (SEMCs) face daunting challenges in the field of agriculture and rural development because of a nexus of problems concerning rural poverty, import dependency, deterioration of natural resources, worrisome demographic trends, etc. The problems to be solved have been well identified and a broad consensus on their nature and magnitude has emerged in recent years. Yet, recent empirical evidence, while confirming this general diagnosis and showing that significant public policy efforts have led to major improvements in recent decades, suggests that a greater sense of urgency than generally perceived is warranted. First, a brief but comprehensive summary of the situation and trends in SEMCs will be presented. The rest of the paper will then be devoted to the implications of this serious situation in the SEMCs for the whole Euro-Mediterranean relationship. We first suggest that too much attention has been given in the past to trade liberalization, from the hope in Barcelona in 1994 to create a fully free trade Euro-Med area by 2010 to the current goal of negotiating bilateral “deep and comprehensive free trade agreements” with as many SEMCs as possible. We will argue that the 2010 goal of a free trade area was utopian, and that the focus on trade liberalization has been distractive both within individual SEMCs and in the construction of the Euro-Med relationship, particularly for agriculture and rural development.