The MFF negotiating box dealing with CAP issues gives a good idea of the extent of the disagreements that must be bridged before a successful outcome.
Tag Archives: budget
EU budget review cautious on future spending priorities
The Commission has published its long-delayed budget review which follows a public consultation on the EU budget which began as a mid-term budget review in 2008-09. An earlier version leaked last year, and apparently drafted by Commission President Barroso’s advisers (see Jack Thurston’s post on this), recommended specific targets for the reallocation of EU spending, [...]
Budget rumbles in Brussels
This autumn the future of the EU budget will take political centre stage in Brussels
Which member states pay for wasteful farm income support?
The closer that CAP reform negotiations come to the finish line, the more will member states look at their financial bottom line. ‘How much do we pay, how much do we get?’ That question will concern finance ministers and heads of states at least as much as the objectives and instruments the CAP funds are spent on.
How much is enough?
The level of the CAP budget should be decided by a comprehensive justification of all expenditure not a gut feeling.
Does the CAP fit?
The biggest driver for reform of the CAP is budgetary and the views of member states are critical, since they hold the EU’s purse strings. A new analysis of member state positions on the EU budget and the CAP shows that while there is support for reform of the EU budget there is little agreement on what reform actually means.
Le Monde debates the CAP
It’s time for a radical reorientation of the CAP towards environmentally-friendly farming
Co-financing the Common Agricultural Policy
As far as the CAP is concerned, probably the most radical proposal in the leaked draft of the Commission’s forthcoming communication on the future of the EU Budget, is for the introduction of co-financing. The draft suggests that a larger responsibility for CAP spending could be assigned to member states, with direct aids ‘co-financed by [...]
Budget directorate wants to cut CAP
Leaked copies of a document from the European Commission’s budget directorate reveal an aspiration to substantially cut agriculture’s share of the EU budget from 2013 onwards.
One year after the budget review conference: What has happened with the CAP reform process?
Until recently, I have walked through Brussels with this grey-blue bag that all participants of the 2008 budget review conference received. In the meantime, it has fallen apart, and I don’t have anything to replace it. This is somewhat similar to the CAP & EU budget debate: the 2008 conference presenting the results of the [...]
Do we need a “common” agricultural policy?
The final paragraph of Commissioner Fischer Boel’s valedictory leaflet is revealing and foreshadows the debate that has yet to surface about the future of the CAP after 2013, the end of the current financial perspective. Mrs Fischer Boel makes the case for maintaining a common European agriculture policy among the EU’s 27 member states, presumably [...]
UK House of Lords reviews 2010 EU draft budget
In a recent report, the UK House of Lords European Committee criticised the European Commission’s proposals for the 2010 European Communities budget for maintaining a very high level of spending on agriculture, and failing to shift adequate resources to stimulus measures to aid economic recovery. It expressed frustration that, in the middle of an economic [...]
10 reasons why the Single Payment Scheme is politically unsustainable (part two)
Last week I posted five reasons why it is hard to justify spending 30 billion euros each year on the Single Payment Scheme. Here are five more reasons.
10 reasons why the Single Payment Scheme is politically unsustainable
The EU spends around 30 billion euros each year on the single payment scheme, by far the largest of the myriad schemes and programmes that together comprise the 54 billion euro budget of the Common Agriculture Policy. The scheme was first introduced in 2005 but it is hard to see it surviving in its current [...]
Budget pressure on CAP
With the Health Check out of the way, it looks as if the medium-term future of the CAP is going to be strongly influenced by discussions of how the EU budget should be spent. This always raises the awkward question of the opportunity cost of spending large sums of money on subsidising farmers.
Commissioner Grybauskaité: no future for direct payments
A major conference entitled “Reforming the Budget, Changing Europe” was held yesterday in Brussels, marking the end of the consultation phase of the ‘no taboos’ review of the future of the EU budget led by Budget Commissioner Dalia Grybauskaité. The former Lithuanian finance minister presented the results of the consultation process that received more than [...]
Auditors’ report makes for sobering reading
The very complexity of the CAP opens it to scams of various kinds. These may not be fraudulent in the criminal sense of the term (although such instances have occurred) but they do represent a use of loopholes to divert public money to line the pockets of individuals.
Turkeys vote for Christmas
By approving a set of proposals to water down the already modest Commission proposals for the health check, the agriculture committee of the European Parliament has reinforced its reputation for thinking rooted firmly in the past and largely captured by the narrow set of producer interests who do well from the CAP status quo. As [...]
Who gets what in EU rural development funds
In December 2006 European Union heads of government agreed a new Financial Regulation, the legal text that sets out the rules for the EU budget. The new Financial Regulation contains new requirements on the public disclosure of end beneficiaries of EU funds. The first significant fruits of the new budget transparency law are due by [...]
The great targeting debate
Czech agriculture minister Petr Gandalovic made an curious statement at the informal Agriculture Council meeting held earlier this week in the French Alps. Mr Gandalovic, who will assume the chairmanship of the Council under the Czech EU Presidency in the first half of 2009, told his colleagues: “The more specific you make the policy, the [...]
Bureaucracy, greed and vanity threaten EU plan to help world’s poorest farmers
The European Commission has published its plans to divert up to a billion euros from CAP underspends to a new fund to help farmers in the developing world to increase productivity in the face of the world food crisis. Higher food prices have meant lower CAP expenditure on market measures such as intervention, storage and [...]
New CAP spending figures show raw deal for new member states
New official figures on how the the €53.5 billion of EU expenditure on the Common Agricultural Policy was distributed in 2007 show just how raw a deal the new member states are getting under Pillar One of the CAP, which still accounts for four fifths of the total CAP budget. The figures are presented in [...]
Mapping the CAP 2: Expenditure & High Nature Value Farmland
In order to animate a transparent debate on the purpose, intensity and spatial distribution of CAP expenditure, a number of maps overlaying CAP expenditure data and high nature value farmland have been produced as part of a study recently completed by IEEP for the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
A CAP that Delivers for Biodiversity?
The vast majority of expenditure under the CAP continues to be directed to income support and is not explicitly targeted at responding to biodiversity, or other pressing environmental objectives. According to a new IEEP study for the UK Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) the distribution and allocation of CAP funding, and the uses [...]
Farm support tops 50 billion euros in 2007
With the release yesterday of new figures on EU expenditure in 2007, the Commission has been busy spinning the line that farm subsidies no longer account for the biggest item of Brussels spending. Most news outlets have been swallowing this line without taking a closer look at the figures which show that a full 50 [...]
Manna from heaven? CAP ‘spare change’ to boost developing country farmers
Surging prices for agricultural commodities means that the EU spends much less on the traditional ‘market measures’ of the CAP such as intervention buying when prices fall below a target price, export subsidies and private storage aid for unsold surpluses. Last year the EU decided to allocate some of this underspend to the Galileo space [...]
Darling’s daring bid for reform
The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister) Alistair Darling wrote earlier this week to all his counterparts on the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) ahead of today’s meeting, setting out the case for a radical reform of the EU’s agriculture and trade policies. Specifically, he calls for the abolition of direct aids [...]
Fischler speaks out
I have recently been working with others on an edited collection to be brought out from the Centre for Policy Studies in Brussels which re-visits the Fischler reforms of the CAP. The discussions held in relation to the book, which involved some people who knew Fischler’s work well, confirmed my view that he was someone [...]
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 [...]
The health check paper: Homeopathy rather than surgery?
The recently leaked Commission Green paper sets the scene for the upcoming health check. What emerges at the moment is a very cautious and minimalist approach, in line with what the Commissioner has been promising for a while. Two things seem striking. The first is the choice to ignore the budget review debate. The second [...]
Forging the link between the Health Check and the Budget Review
The CAP Health Check has been promoted by the Commission as an exercise focused on tidying up the loose ends of the 2003 Mid Term Review and adapting the CAP to an evolving set of circumstances for the period 2008 – 2013. However, this is only half the equation. The Budget Review is set to [...]
Less likelihood of cuts in Single Farm Payment
The Irish Farmers’ Journal reports that the value of the Single Farm Payment (SFP) is not likely to be greatly eroded by “financial discipline” cuts in order to accommodate the payments to new Member States within the European Union. This is because more buoyant farm prices mean that there will be huge cuts in the [...]
Fischer Boel sets course for CAP Health Check
Speaking at a meeting of the Parliamentary Agriculture Committee in Nicosia, Cyprus on 29 June, Agriculture Commissioner laid out her current thinking on the future of the CAP, in particular the changes she will be proposing later this year for the CAP Health Check.
