As DG Agriculture’s spokesman Michael Mann has been keen to stress over the past few days since the publication of the Commission’s communication on the CAP health check, this is just the start of the process of deliberation and debate. Dr Tamsin Cooper of the Institute for European Environmental Policy has written a useful briefing [...]
Archive | November, 2007
So how green is the Health check “green paper”?
The Commission’s “CAP Health Check” communication acknowledges the fact that European Farming and countryside face unprecedented environmental challenges: continuous biodiversity decline, increasing climate change and a looming water crisis. The Communication fails however to come up with credible proposals for dealing with these challenges. It was hoped that the Commission would use the Health Check [...]
Specious arguments against limiting payments to largest farms
Initial media reaction to the Commission’s Health Check proposals has been predictable, with most papers picking up as the lead story the Commission’s proposal to apply a tapering reduction to direct payments to larger farms. The Financial Times story was headlined “Communists and royalty fight farm subsidy cuts.” Much was made of the fact that [...]
Commission proposals lack ambition
Later today the European Commission will present its proposals for changes to the Common Agricultural Policy – for so long an emblem of bureaucracy, waste and injustice. This will be the first reform since details began to emerge from top secret government files about exactly who gets what from the €55 billion Europe spends each [...]
European Agriculture: un tour d’horizon
The debate over the future of the CAP will begin in earnest next week with the Commission’s proposals for the ‘health check’. Just in time comes an excellent new website that offers a view of the agricultural situation in each of the 27 EU member states. This is a much needed resource that combines official [...]
Sneak peak at latest health check leak
Anyone itching to find out what the Commission will be proposing for the CAP health check next Tuesday 20 November need look no further. DG Agri is as leaky as the proverbial sieve and after the jump we have for your reading pleasure the latest version of the consultation document, including a markup of changes [...]
Remembering Secondo Tarditi
Readers of CAP Health Check will recall the death earlier this year of Secondo Tarditi, who was one of its founding members. Ulrich Koester of the University of Kiel in Germany, and a close friend and colleague of Secondo, has written an appreciation: The international community of agricultural economists has lost a highly respected colleague. [...]
Why agricultural policy reform is so difficult
Over on the excellent VoxEU site, Thomas Hertel, Roman Keeney and Alan Winters try to answer the question why agricultural policy is so difficult to reform, as illustrated by the way in which difficulties in getting agreement on reduced agricultural support and protection has been one of the factors preventing progress in the Doha Round. [...]
