Many factors (refugees, climate change, problems of the euro zone, Brexit, etc.) have an impact on the decisions of public support donors, who try to rationalize CAP expenditure and look for savings after 2020. The legitimisation of further continuation will be obtained only by the most effective instruments that fit into the assumptions of horizontal policies. The most important challenges regarding the future policy were characterized, referring to the trends of changes as a result of endogenous and exogenous factors. Developments over recent years have shown that the EU budget has had to provide support to response to specific problems. There is a need to explore the right balance of instruments in the future CAP between policy measures and financial envelopes, grants and financial instruments and risk-management tools to cope with risk and unexpected adverse events in the agricultural sector. Finally, authors gave several reasons for further reform of the CAP. It is a review article and it is a synthesis of current knowledge in this area.