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CAP strategic planning: scope and implications

We are pleased to welcome this guest post by Emil Erjavec, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Policy and Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is a version of his keynote speech to be delivered at the “The future of the CAP – L’avenir de la PAC” conference organised by Société Française d’Économie Rurale at Montpellier Supagro on 22 June 2018.

In December 2017, the European Commission published a Communication announcing a new round of important changes to the CAP post-2020; its legislative proposals, published June 1st 2018, have officially initiated it. Whether these changes are truly far-reaching and whether they contribute to a more efficient, effective and less controversial policy, will largely depend on the result of inter-institutional negotiations and later national implementation.

Nevertheless, the basic building blocks of reform are known. I agree with those who point out that this reform is primarily about changes in the institutional approach and responsibility of agricultural policy and less about changes in available policy instruments.… Read the rest

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The greening architecture in the new CAP

Environmental NGOs were harsh in their immediate criticism of the legislative proposals on the new CAP. Greepeace said that the EU farming plan “could spell disaster for the environment”. BirdLife Europe said that “The European Commission’s claim that the new proposal will deliver a higher environmental and climate ambition has fallen flat”, arguing that the new plan “does not guarantee any spending on biodiversity and grotesquely slashes funds ring-fenced for the environment across the board”.

Birdlife Europe has produced a detailed assessment of the Commission’s proposals in a handy tabular form, pointing out both weaknesses in the proposals themselves as well as omissions where the proposals could be strengtened (a summary of this assessment has appeared on this blog).

In this post, I review some of the issues raised by these critiques and explain some of the key differences between the proposed new greening architecture and the policy that it would replace.… Read the rest

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France’s puzzling interest in increasing the CAP budget

The Commission’s CAP legislative proposals which were published on 1 June 2018 attracted some immediate reactions from different groups of stakeholders setting out their positions. The proposals are far-reaching and complex. Together with the impact assessment, they amount to 662 pages of text. They require time and careful analysis to fully understand. In the coming weeks, I hope to examine some of the key elements one at a time.

I begin with the budgetary allocations by Member States which are included as Annexes to the draft CAP Strategic Plans regulation. This combines the current direct payments and rural development regulations into one.

This has a certain topicality because agricultural Ministers from six Member States – FR, ES, IE, PT, FI and EL – met in Madrid recently to formulate a declaration calling for the CAP budget to be maintained at its current level. This declaration – which is open to agricultural Ministers from other Member States to support – will be presented and discussed at the next AGRIFISH Council on June 18-19.… Read the rest

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Commission Proposals on CAP: Will this become another decade of biodiversity decline?

We are pleased to welcome this guest contribution from Trees Robijns, Agriculture and Bioenergy Policy Officer, NABU (BirdLife in Germany) and Ariel Brunner, Senior Head of Policy, BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, who react to the Commission legislation proposals on the Common Agricultural Policy post 2020 published earlier today.

We have seen it all before: CAP reform. The same old CAP reform. To many of us following the process in detail, we are always in the run up to, in the middle of, or in the aftermath of a CAP reform. It feels like a never ending story of small incremental steps which, only to the absolute “uber-CAP-nerd”, lead in a clear direction.

Today, we had another déjà vu. The Commission had a press conference, NGOs and farmer organisations reacted strongly. Agri ministers meeting in Sofia this weekend will probably welcome the proposal in diplomatic speech and Parliamentarians will start to prepare thousands of amendments.… Read the rest

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By how much is the CAP budget cut in the Commission’s MFF proposals?

Unlike in its presentation of its proposal for the current MFF in 2011, the Commission on this occasion in presenting its proposal for the 2021-2027 MFF did not provide comparative details on ceilings in the last year of the earlier MFF.

There are some understandable reasons for this. The next MFF is designed for 27 Member States without the UK, and so is not directly comparable with the current MFF. Also, the Commission has proposed a different and more simplified structure for the MFF which makes direct comparison difficult.

Nonetheless, in the absence of a column showing 2020 ceilings for the various MFF headings, it is not straightforward to try to work out whether the 2021-2027 figures represent an increase or decrease in proposed commitments and by how much. The Commission did not help its case by providing briefings on what these increases or decreases might be but only in current prices, thereby mixing up the effects of inflation and real changes in the volume of expenditure.… Read the rest

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The CAP and its limited effect on development

Dr Bettina Rudloff of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik / German Institute for International and Security Affairs and Michael Brüntrup of the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute recently published a joint briefing paper on the implications of CAP reform for development. Their paper is available in English to download here, and they have contributed the following abstract.

For a long time the CAP has been accused of causing damage to developing countries. However, several reforms have limited these risks to a handful of issues. Especially further coupling and the missing internalization of costs related to climate and the environment are the remaining risks for developing countries.

Other risks can arise due to the complex interplay of the CAP with other policies like trade or energy policy, which is relevant for biofuel or soy imports. Such risks can only be partly addressed by CAP reform, i.e. not to extend coupling.… Read the rest

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Why capping will be a mirage

Commissioner Hogan confirmed in his press conference folllowing the publication of the Commission’s proposal on the next Multi-annual Financial Framework that the Commission intends to introduce a cap of €60,000 on the maximum amount of direct payments any holding can receive in the next CAP legislative period. Commission President Juncker is reported as telling the Belgian Parliament earlier this week that “the European Commission will propose a €60,000 limit on individual direct payments to support small farm holdings instead of ‘agricultural factories’”. These statements are misleading and disingenuous, because they ignore what is likely to be the fine-print in the Commission proposal.

The problem is that this proposal is unlikely to achieve its intended objective. The leaked draft of the Commission’s legislative proposals requires Member States to first deduct (the language used is “shall deduct”) the value of salaries paid from the direct payments received before the cap is applied.… Read the rest

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Commission assaults rural development spending to protect direct payments

Please note that the key chart in this post (the third chart, comparing the CAP ceiling in 2027 with that in 2020, has been updated using Commission figures in this post.

The Commission’s MFF proposal (including both ceilings for expenditure as well as ideas on how to finance the budget) was published yesterday. The Commission claims that the proposal includes reductions of roughly 5% in both the Common Agricultural Policy and Cohesion Policy programmes, as they have the largest financial envelopes. However, another way of looking at the numbers suggests that the cut is more like 15% overall in real terms over the period of the next MFF, but with a much bigger cut in Pillar 2 rural development expenditure of around 26%. Direct payments will be maintained constant in nominal terms. In this post, I set out the analysis behind these figures.

Budget Commissioner Oettinger had been indicating for some time before the publication of the MFF proposals that the CAP budget would be cut by around 6%.… Read the rest

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Is there a particular generational renewal problem in EU agriculture?

Six years ago, I wrote a post The greying of Europe’s farmers which reviewed the evidence on the ageing of farm operators up to that point in time (the latest data available referred to 2007). The data confirmed that Europe’s farmers were getting older. However, I questioned whether this was evidence of a growing policy problem. Instead, I suggested “that what we observe is a slow upward shift in the age distribution which can be explained by general social trends (longer schooling periods and longer longevity) rather than any specific worsening of the generational transfer problem in agriculture as such.”

The greying of Europe’s farmers continues…

The recent publication by Eurostat of the first results from the 2016 Farm Structure Survey allows us to revisit this issue. The table below shows trends over the period since 2005. Because 2016 data are not yet available for four Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Italy and Luxembourg) I provide two series in the table – one for the EU-28, and the longer series for the EU-24.… Read the rest

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The CAP and migration

One of the more unexpected sections in the Commission Communication The Future of Food and Farming published in November 2017 was the very final section on Migration. This begins “The future CAP must play a larger role in implementing the outcome of the Valetta (sic) Summit, addressing the root causes of migration.” This is, to my knowledge, the first time that an explicit link has been made between the CAP and migration pressures from countries outside the EU in a Commission publication. For example, in the most recent EU Policy Coherence for Development report from 2015, the section on agricultural policy makes no reference to migration.

The root causes of migration

However, 2015 was the year in which more than one million undocumented migrants and refugees arrived in Europe, and several thousands more died in their attempt to cross the Mediterranean. In May of that year, the Commission published its communication A European Agenda on Migration.… Read the rest