This detailed document does not yet appear to have been published on the Council or Commission websites. But you can download it here in Word format.
A little light relief
It’s Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week. What better to calm the nerves after all the excitement of the health check than to take a break by spending a few minutes playing a new online video game from the European Commission? It’s called Farmland: The Game and in it you will have to learn how to feed calves, take care of pigs in a pigsty and visit the henhouse to collect eggs. On the game’s more advanced levels you may be required to stamp out an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, fill out an IACS form and organise a delegation of farmers from your region to lobby the European Parliament. Once you’ve mastered these tasks, you can, as the jargon goes, move ‘downstream in the food chain’ by playing the “transport and the supermarket games”. What fun!
Continue reading “A little light relief”Commission did suppress cross compliance report, says MEP
A week ago I asked why a unfavourable report on cross compliance by the Court of Auditors, adopted on 4 November, has not yet been published. I wondered whether it had anything to do with the imminent end game of the health check negotiations, which featured propoals to further weaken cross compliance requirements. Turns out my hunch was correct. The Commission did not want the report to see the light of day, at least not until the health check was done and dusted, according to Paulo Casaca MEP.
Podcast: the inside story on the health check deal
Roger Waite, Editor of Agra Facts, gives the inside story on the all-night negotiations that led to a deal early this morning (20th November) on the health check of the CAP. He explains how the negotiations were handled, that the big winners were Italy, Germany and France and that at key moments there was intervention from several heads of government. He also explains that the United Kingdom was joined by several of the new member states who were not able to fully endorse to the final agreement.
According to Roger the biggest surprises were a new milk fund and the decimation of the progressive element to its plan to redirect farm subsidies from direct aids to funds for farmland conservation and rural economic development.
So who voted for what?
Unanimity, like pregnancy, has a binary quality. A decision can’t be ‘virtually unanimous’. But this is just how French farms minister Michel Barnier described this morning’s final compromise agreement on the health check package. So which of the EU 27 member states were unable to acquiesce in the deal? My sources tell Roger Waite tells me it was the UK plus three others (I assume Denmark, Sweden and perhaps the Netherlands or Estonia) Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia [update: and Estonia]. Can well-informed readers offer some further illumination? Continue reading “So who voted for what?”
Parliament's health check recriminations begin
With the ink barely dry on the Council of Ministers’ final compromise deal on the health check, leading members of the European Parliament are laying into each other after a day of chaotic voting on the Parliament’s approach to the CAP. In a podcast interview yesterday, Paulo Casaca MEP (Socialist Group) told me that the Parliament was ‘lost’ and suffering from a lack of political leadership, something he thought could come from the Commission or from within the Parliament itself. Meanwhile Neil Parish MEP, chairman of the Agriculture Committee and a senior member of the right-leaning European Peoples Party – European Democrats grouping, voted against his own committee’s report and against the EPP-ED position. Continue reading “Parliament's health check recriminations begin”
Parliament’s health check recriminations begin
With the ink barely dry on the Council of Ministers’ final compromise deal on the health check, leading members of the European Parliament are laying into each other after a day of chaotic voting on the Parliament’s approach to the CAP. In a podcast interview yesterday, Paulo Casaca MEP (Socialist Group) told me that the Parliament was ‘lost’ and suffering from a lack of political leadership, something he thought could come from the Commission or from within the Parliament itself. Meanwhile Neil Parish MEP, chairman of the Agriculture Committee and a senior member of the right-leaning European Peoples Party – European Democrats grouping, voted against his own committee’s report and against the EPP-ED position. Continue reading “Parliament’s health check recriminations begin”
+++ Health Check deal +++
European farm ministers have reached a deal on the CAP health check. The principal points are these:
* Five annual milk quota increases of 1% each with effect from April 2009, prior to total abolition of the quota system as from April 1 2015 (unchanged from Commission proposal). As is now traditional, when it comes to milk quota, Italy will receive a special derogation that allows it to increase its quota by the full 5% in the first year.
* The rate of modulation (shifting funds from direct aids to rural development aids) will be raised from 5% at present to 10% by 2012. The increase will be made gradually: 7% in 2009, 8% in 2010, and 9% in 2011. The progressive modulation concept has been watered down; only recipients of more than €300,000 will face a higher modulation rate: 4 per centage points higher than the standard rate. The resulting money will be allocated for ‘new challenges’ – climate change, energy, biodiversity and water management but will it will also have to fund “accompanying measures” for the dairy sector.
This looks like a setback for the Commission, which had hoped to ‘walk the talk’ on increasing the emphasis on targeted policies like farmland conservation and rural economic development over traditional farm handouts.
The Commission’s green paper of November 2007 floated the idea of a basic modulation rate of 13% by 2013, rising to 23% on payments over 100,000 euros, 38% on payments above 200,000 euros and 58% on payments above 300,000 euros. By May 2008 the Commission had scaled back its ambitions to a basic modulation rate of 13% by 2013, rising to 22% on payments above 300,000 euros. Today the Council has agreed a basic modulation rate of 10% in 2013, and that there should be no intermediate bands of higher modulation, with just a 14% band for payments above 300,000 euros.
According to previous impact assessments, the budgetary effect of this is to transfer 1.2 billion euros for rural development by 2013 (less than this in the earlier years). This is from a total direct payments pot of some 36 billion euros a year. As a rule of thumb, each percentage point of modulation skims off 200 million euros a year.
This represents a victory for those who want to preserve the CAP as a system of income entitlements for landowners and a defeat for those who want to see public money targeted at public goods.
* The existing partial coupling options for arable crops will be abolished from 2010. For nuts, protein crops, flax and hemp, the end of partial coupling has been delayed until 2012.
* A maximum of 10% of each country’s single farm payment allocation may be re-allocated under Article 68 schemes that allow for sectoral targeting of aid. The Council increased the proportion of this money that may be coupled to production from 25% to 35%. €90m per year saved by the abolition of energy crop subsidies will be allocated for Article 68 measures in the 12 new member states.
* Single Farm Payments will not be paid below a minimum value of €250, or a minimum one hectare of SFP-eligible farm area. Countries may be entitled to vary this threshold upwards or downwards, according to their own circumstances.
Download the full Presidency press release (in French). Versions in other languages will be available here.
Podcast: Paulo Casaca MEP on the chaos of Parliament's farm policy
In the second of today’s podcasts from the European Parliament, Paulo Casaca MEP gives his immediate reaction to a series of votes on the CAP health check that saw many MEPs break ranks from agreed party lines, evidence of the passions that are aroused when the Parliament debates food and farming. He argues that the Parliament has lost its way on the CAP and must come up with a new vision for the future of the policy. Mr Casaca is a Portuguese member of the Socialist Group and represents the Azores. He sits on the Budget Committee and chairs the pro-CAP reform Land Use & Food Policy Intergroup.
Podcast: Paulo Casaca MEP on the chaos of Parliament’s farm policy
In the second of today’s podcasts from the European Parliament, Paulo Casaca MEP gives his immediate reaction to a series of votes on the CAP health check that saw many MEPs break ranks from agreed party lines, evidence of the passions that are aroused when the Parliament debates food and farming. He argues that the Parliament has lost its way on the CAP and must come up with a new vision for the future of the policy. Mr Casaca is a Portuguese member of the Socialist Group and represents the Azores. He sits on the Budget Committee and chairs the pro-CAP reform Land Use & Food Policy Intergroup.