Year: 2013

Posted on

Forum on CAP reform

I did not get time before Christmas to draw attention to the Forum on the Common Agricultural Policy after 2013, a series of articles on the CAP reform process published in the Nov/Dec issue of Intereconomics. This is a review of European economic policy published jointly by the Centre for European Policy Studies and the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. I contributed one of the articles, and the contributions of my colleagues are uniformly excellent even if they take different views on some of the main issues.
The full list of contents is as follows:
Jean-Christophe Bureau Where is the Common Agricultural Policy heading?
Stefan Tangermann CAP reform and the future of direct payments
Alan Matthews Greening the Common Agricultural Policy post-2013
Davide Viaggi Rural development in the post-2013 CAP: huge opportunity or devil in the details?
Christophe Crombez, Louise Knops and Johan Swinnen Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy under the co-decision procedure
Jean-Christophe Bureau accepts that the Commission’s reform proposal does not address the most fundamental criticisms of the CAP including the unwanted effects of direct payments and the lack of targeting of the budget on public goods.… Read the rest

Posted on

Welcome to the Irish Presidency

Ireland took over the EU Presidency from 1 January 2013 and the Irish Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Simon Coveney, will chair the Council of Agricultural Ministers for the next six months. Coveney is an energetic Minister and the Irish have an experienced bunch of officials (see who’s who in the Irish delegation) who will do everything to ensure an agreement on CAP reform on their watch.
Securing an agreement under the Irish Presidency is conceivable. But I am going to argue that the institutional decision-making process between the Council and the Parliament, as well as the linkage with the Multi-annual Frinancial Framework (MFF) negotiations, will make it extraordinarily difficult, even assuming that the European Council will reach an agreement on the next MFF at its next meeting on 7-8 February 2013.
In this post I discuss my understanding of the decision-making process (the ordinary legislative procedure, also known as co-decision) over the next six months.… Read the rest