Europe and OECD countries have special responsibilities in regard to food security and sustainable development in the world, and certainly can do more to promote a worldwide sustainable development and quality of life. The European Community has been very successful in several grounds, but one of the most important areas of European coordination has been the common agricultural policy (CAP) since the beginning of the common market creation. In this paper the main argument is the proposition that “regulation” is a necessary, but not sufficient factor to have better markets, where they have the pre-conditions to work properly and deliver a Pareto Optimal solution. In other words, regulations are needed to make markets work better and do not necessarily means more governmental intervention in the economic system. They are several forms of regulations, and some of them can also exist based on new institutional arrangements including other stakeholders beyond governments. The European example will be discussed, based on CAP food and agricultural policies, but also some other examples will be explored and discussed in regard to food policies directed to improve food security levels worldwide. Some referential models for agricultural development will be explored, based on the induced economic perspective (Hayami and Ruttan 1985), and author previous work, merging those models with a structural development model, such that some overview of the future conditions can be perceived in regard to a specific stage of the countries development trends. The example of the agribusiness sector in Portugal is used to show the relevance of the proposed models and to offer some explanatory arguments about the EU integration impact and actual evolution in regard to food security and sustainable development concerns, locally and globally.