As we head into the end-game of the health check, Roger Waite, editor of Agra Facts, analyses the big five outstanding issues:
1. Dairy quotas – how to ensure a smooth transition to a free market in milk within the EU.
2. Article 68 – targeted policies or recoupling via the backdoor?
3. Modulation – how to move money from old-style farm subsidies, especially to Europe’s largest farms, to fund rural development and farmland conservation.
4. Co-financing – will the health check require hard-pressed member state treasuries to find more nationally-funded spending for the CAP?
5. The future of common market organisations – an end to intervention?
Roger also gives his views on the likely successor to Mariann Fischer Boel, whom he expects to stand down as Agriculture Commissioner in 2009.
