Month: October 2025

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Further reflections on CAP governance and budget

This post has been revised to take account of the important role that the proposed ‘flexibility amount’ will play in influencing the scope that Member States will have to top up their minimum CAP ring-fenced amounts when preparing the CAP chapter of their National Plans. Its significance is such that it changes the tenor and conclusions of the original post. I am particularly grateful to Elsa Régnier for drawing this issue to my attention. I made a further revision subsequently as detailed at the end of the post to compare the minimum ring-fenced amounts for CAP income support with the pre-allocated amounts to Member States in 2021-2027 rather than with a hypothetical extension of the 2027 amounts, and as well corrected the calculation of the flexibility amount.

IDDRI, the Institut du développement durable et des relations internationals, has published a policy brief on the European Financial Framework 2028-2034: Key issues for the agricultural sector written by Elsa Régnier, Aurélie Catallo, and Pierre-Marie Aubert.… Read the rest

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Relevant data on CAP implementation no longer published

Please note that DG AGRI have now (22 October 2025) published a CAP Performance Tables Excel file containing details for all interventions by Member States on the number of beneficiaries, area covered and expenditure for the 2023-2024 year for the CAP Strategic Plans. It is planned to load these data into the PMEF Data Explorer in the DG AGRI Agri-food Data Portal in due course. These tables provide the data that I was looking for in this post.

DG AGRI published its first status report on the implementation of country CAP Strategic Plans for the year 2023-2024 in June 2025. The report is based on the Annual Performance Reports that Member States must submit to the Commission by 15 February for the financial year ending the previous 15 October. Thus, this report draws on the Performance Reports submitted for the second year of the programming period ending October 2024. As area and animal-based payments paid in the financial year October 2023-October 2024 refer to claim year 2023, much of the data in practice refers to the first year of implementation of the new CAP.… Read the rest

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European Parliament votes on CAP simplification and strengthening farmers’ position in the food supply chain

The European Parliament voted today to determine its position on two amending pieces of legislation proposed by the Commission that can significantly modify rules for Member States and farmers in the remaining years of the current CAP. One is the Omnibus Simplification Regulation COM (2025) 236 amending the CAP Strategic Plans Regulation 2021/2115 and the Common Market Organisation (CMO) Regulation 1308/2013, while the other is the proposal COM (2024) 577 to amend the CMO Regulation and some aspects of the Strategic Plans Regulation to strengthen farmers’ position in the food supply chain.

The context for these two proposals is, firstly, the general shift in Commission priorities to boost competitiveness, innovation and growth in the wake of the Draghi report. This report called for increased investment in innovation, a stronger Single Market through market integration, a greater focus on resilience and strategic autonomy for critical sectors like energy and raw materials, as well as a more supportive business environment by reducing regulatory burdens.… Read the rest

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The EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement will have a minimal effect on the EU beef market and should be ratified

The European Commission finally put forward the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement concluded in December 2024 for ratification on 3 September 2025. The Commission adopted proposals for Council decisions on the signature and conclusion of two parallel legal instruments: the EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement (EMPA) and the interim Trade Agreement (iTA). The iTA will be repealed and replaced by the EMPA once the latter is fully ratified and enters into force. 

Livestock farmers continue to protest and to mobilise against ratification of the Agreement, arguing that it will open the EU market to a flood of South American imports and decimate the EU beef sector. But for beef and poultry, the tariff concessions are limited to relatively small increases in tariff rate quotas. These additional imports will result in lower prices for EU farmers compared to what otherwise they might expect, but recent empirical research suggests that the effect will be very muted.

In a recently-published paper with Alex Gohin, we estimate that if the EU had fully liberalised its beef tariffs with Mercosur countries in 2017 (the latest year for which all the relevant data for the analysis was available), beef farmers would have suffered a significant negative impact on their income of more than -5%.… Read the rest