Last week I participated in a session on the state of the CAP reform negotiations at the annual conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics in Parma.
There were four presentations in the session, including an overview of the state of play in the negotiations by Giovanni Anania; a review of the CAP greening proposals by Jean-Christophe Bureau; an examination of the proposed changes in the rural development regulation by Francesco Mantino; and a discussion of how co-decision is influencing the outcome of these negotiations by myself.
Because the presentations might be of more general interest, with the permission of the presenters I plan to link to them over the next few days. This post links to the presentations of Giovanni Anania and Jean-Christophe Bureau.
Giovanni Anania’s (University of Calabria) presentation here in his well-known technicolour style is in two parts. The first part consists of the actual presentation (time was short, so the number of slides which could be covered was limited). The key point in this first part of the presentation is a useful comparison between the positions of the Council and the Parliament on the issues under negotiation in the trilogue process.
Anania concludes that both arms of the legislature share the same vision of a significantly more conservative and ‘farmer-friendly’ CAP post-2013 than that in the Commission’s proposal. While differences exist on relevant points, he concludes that the Council and the EP are not significantly apart on the most important elements of the reform package. Nonetheless, he is sceptical that sufficient time remains to conclude a political agreement before the final Council meeting of the Irish Presidency on June 24-25.
The remaining slides in the presentation provide useful summaries in bullet-point form of many of the key elements in the negotiations comparing the original Commission proposal, the Council position and the Parliament mandate.
Jean-Christophe Bureau’s (AgroParisTech and INRA) presentation here asks how much greening will the ‘greening’ of direct payments actually bring? Bureau accepts that conditioning 30% of Pillar 1 payments to a green payment is much less cost efficient than targeted agri-environment measures, but he argues that the Commission’s proposals still represented a genuine willingness to green the CAP. His presentation shows that the Council and Parliament amendments are leading to a considerable weakening of the Commission’s greening proposals such that the answer to the question whether greening is for real must be a resounding ‘No’.
I will upload the other presentations in this session in the next few days.
Photo credit Parma Duomo by Visit Italy
