Tag: co-decision

Posted on

Brakes removed from voluntary coupled support

I have previously written about the provisions for voluntary coupled support (VCS) in the 2013 CAP reform package in this blog post in 2015 entitled “Two steps forward, one step back: coupled payments in the CAP”. That post gives a historical overview of the gradual phasing out of coupled payments during the 2000s and the reversal of this process in the 2013 reform. In the recently-agreed Omnibus Agricultural Provisions Regulation (EU) 2017/2393, a significant relaxation of the conditions that Member States must meet in gaining approval for their VCS schemes was introduced. The negotiating history of this amendment is particularly opaque and sheds an interesting light on the secrecy and non-transparency of the trilogue process in which the Council and European Parliament, as co-legislators, try to reach agreement on legislative proposals.

In this post, I describe the changes introduced and assess their significance.

VCS in the 2013 CAP reform

To recap, the rules governing VCS following the last CAP reform were set down in the Direct Payments Regulation (EU) 1307/2103.… Read the rest

Posted on

Impact of the MFF negotiations on the CAP 2013 reform

The CAP 2013 reform was the first negotiated under the ordinary legislative procedure (co-decision) in which both the Parliament and the Council had equal powers. A project undertaken by the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels for the European Parliament’s Policy Department has sought to examine what impact and influence the Parliament had on the CAP 2013 out-turn as a result of co-decision. Did co-decision give the Parliament a greater opportunity to influence the final outcome, who were the key players in shaping the Parliament’s views and what did the Parliament use its influence to achieve?
The final study, when it is published, will throw light on these issues. The team behind the study (of which I was one) also commissioned a series of case studies on specific issues raised in the co-decision process. These case studies are now available on the CEPS website. They include a detailed amendment analysis by Imre Fertð and Attila Kovács of the Council and Parliament amendments to the Commission’s original draft proposals which evaluates the relative effectiveness of the two bodies in carrying their amendments into the final legislation, a detailed study of the role of COMAGRI by Christilla Roederer-Rynning, an analysis of the evolution of the greening debate by Kaley Hart, and an analysis of the European Parliament’s position on market regulation by Alessandro Olper.… Read the rest

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