Month: August 2018

Posted on

Two indicators, little in common, same name: Market Price Support

We are pleased to welcome this guest post by Lars Brink, who is an independent advisor working from Canada.

This post examines the concepts and calculations of the two different agricultural policy indicators called Market Price Support (MPS): the one is used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its measurement of producer support in its Producer Support Estimate (PSE) indicator, and the other is identified in the Agreement on Agriculture (AA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as part of the measurement of the Aggregate Measurement of Support (AMS) indicator.

Once the United Kingdom (UK) has withdrawn from the European Union, the UK by itself will be the entity for which support to agriculture is measured under the practices or rules of international organizations such as the OECD and the WTO.

As a non-EU member of the OECD, the UK is assumed to participate in the measurement of the OECD’s PSE.… Read the rest

Posted on

More on capping direct payments

I want to revert to the topic of the capping of direct payments under the CAP, which I last discussed here and here. It is not the most important issue in the Commission’s legislative proposals for the CAP after 2020. But the issue of the fairness of direct payments was raised as an issue in the CAP Communication, and the proposed capping has been defended as a significant step in the better targeting of these payments. There is thus some interest in asking how effective it is likely to be.

The current situation

The current situation reflecting the distribution of payments in claim year 2015 is shown in the following graph. The graph shows the cumulative number of beneficiaries and their cumulative share of total direct payments in that year. What emerges clearly is the large number of very small beneficiaries. On average, at EU level, half of the direct payments beneficiaries receive less than €1,250 per year (around €100/month), corresponding to 4.5% of the total direct payments envelope.… Read the rest

Posted on

The drought crisis must serve as a wakeup call to Agriculture Ministers

We are pleased to welcome this guest post by Harriet Bradley and Ariel Brunner of Birdlife Europe.

EU agriculture is not prepared for the climate crisis – the next CAP must urgently fund a full scale transition to ecologically resilient agriculture

The drought that has struck farmers this summer has exposed the extreme vulnerability of conventional agricultural systems to environmental shocks. Across Europe, harvests have been severely affected by the summer drought, leading to a lack in particular of feed for livestock.

The response by the EU Commission, governments and the conventional farm unions has been disappointingly ‘conventional’. First, the granting of emergency aid such as in Germany , which can provide a necessary stop gap, but does not fix the fundamental problem. Second, the situation has been used to suspend some of the only environmental measures on farms, namely by allowing farmers to grow crops on areas they are paid to reserve for nature and on land that is being left ‘fallow’ to recover.… Read the rest

Posted on

Wales charts course towards radically different farm policy

Wales is one of the three devolved government regions which along with England make up the four countries in the UK. Its agricultural sector is, in absolute terms, small. Around 38,400 holdings farm an area of 1.9 million hectares, with an average farm size of 49 hectares. Just over 15,000 of these holdings receive support under Pillar 1 of the CAP as many of them are deemed to be ‘very small’ with insignificant agricultural activity. These farms produce output valued at £1.6 billion in 2017, contributing a gross value added of €457 million and a total income from farming (TIFF) of £276 million in that year (statistics taken from Wales Statistics and Research, Farming Facts and Figures, Wales 2018 and the Aggregate agricultural output and income web page).

Total receipts under the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) amounted to £234 million while agri-environment payments under the Glaistir scheme amounted to a further £55.7 million in 2017.… Read the rest