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The June Agricultural Council

All roads lead to Luxembourg this weekend where agricultural Ministers begin to gather on Sunday for individual trilaterals with the Irish Presidency and the Commission prior to the formal opening of the Agricultural Council meeting on Monday next. The schedule for the following few days is set out in this post from Alistair Driver of the Farmers Guardian.
Monday morning is set aside for a formal Council discussion with a view to revising the Presidency’s mandate for the trilogue negotiations with the Parliament. Parallel trilogues with the Parliament’s negotiating team on the four regulations will then take place on Monday afternoon. Tuesday the Council will discuss the remaining issues of contention in a bid to find common ground and on Wednesday the Presidency returns to Brussels for what is hoped will be the final trilogue with the Commission and Parliament in the bid to reach a political agreement on the revision of the CAP regulations for the 2014-2020 period.… Read the rest

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The MFF compromise texts

Euractiv.fr yesterday published the texts of the three documents which make up the compromise package to be put to the Council and Parliament following the trilogue meeting on 19-20 June. The three documents are:

    Draft COUNCIL REGULATION laying down the multiannual financial framework for the years 2014-2020
    Draft Inter-Institutional Agreement between the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission on budgetary discipline, cooperation in budgetary matters and on sound financial management
    Draft declarations relevant to the above two pieces of legislation.

(Note that the texts can be read but not downloaded from the Euractiv.fr website; a downloadable copy of the draft MFF regulation is available here.)
As I reported yesterday, total commitment appropriations in the draft MFF Regulation are exactly the same as those agreed by the European Council in February 2013. However, the Regulation includes the compromises on budget flexibility and MFF revision proposed by the Presidency (it is not accurate to describe these compromises as agreed in the trilogue as the Parliament representatives simply accepted that the compromise drafts could be forwarded for consideration by the Parliament plenary without necessarily agreeing their content, see this statement from Reimer Böge issued on behalf of the EPP Group).… Read the rest

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Provisional MFF agreement still to be approved

The prediction in my last post on the MFF that it would be a long midnight on Tuesday 18th June proved only too true, with the Presidency, Parliament and Commission negotiators finally reaching agreement only after more than 24 hours of talks around 8 pm last night on a compromise MFF text to forward to the Council and Parliament. The compromise agreement represents a major achievement for the Irish Presidency, but must yet be signed off by the Council and Parliament. We must now see whether the momentum will carry over to the CAP negotiations at the beginning of next week.
What has been agreed?
The full text of the agreement is not available at the time of writing. Both the Irish Presidency and Alain Lamassoure, chair of the EP Budget committee, held their cards close to their chests last night. The Presidency indicated that details of the compromise had first to be shared with the other member states.… Read the rest

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Tuesday 18 June – high noon (or long midnight) for an MFF agreement?

I previously posted updates on the state of play in the MFF negotiations on 29 April and 15 May last. At the end of April, the General Affairs Council had just agreed the ‘political guidance’ for the Irish Presidency to start discussions with the Parliament’s negotiating team. However, the Parliament had refused to attend the first proposed trilogue meeting with the Presidency and Commission because of the Council’s unwillingness to commit to meet the anticipated gap in payment appropriations in the EU’s 2013 budget.
A trilateral meeting of Presidents was held on May 6 which broke this deadlock (see my 15 May post for details). The first trilogue meeting took place on May 13 but dealt largely with procedural issues. Since then, the trilogue discussions have continued with a number of additional meetings scheduled, most recently on Monday 10 June.
That meeting failed to reach agreement although a number of the participants have tried to talk up the momentum (see the Irish Presidency press release as well as Budget Commissioner Lewanowski’s press release) following the meeting.… Read the rest

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What will change in EU rural development policies after 2013?

The Commission’s draft rural development regulation in its CAP post-2013 package has attracted much less attention than the direct payments and single common market organisation regulations. But while the rural development regulation has given rise to fewer controversies, there will be changes in the ways rural development programmes are implemented and managed.
These changes were outlined and discussed in the presentation by Francesco Mantino (INEA, Italy) on the EU’s new rural development policy after 2013 given as part of the session on the state of the CAP reform negotiations at the annual conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics in Parma.
Mantino’s presentation focuses on four elements:
• The main changes in the regulations concerning rural development (and cohesion) policies
• The state of the art in the trilogue negotiations
• The financial and institutional factors influencing the design of future rural development programmes
• Some preliminary discussion of policy strategies in some selected EU countries (France, Spain and Italy) and factors likely to influence success or failure.… Read the rest

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Where stand the CAP reform negotiations?

Last week I participated in a session on the state of the CAP reform negotiations at the annual conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics in Parma.
There were four presentations in the session, including an overview of the state of play in the negotiations by Giovanni Anania; a review of the CAP greening proposals by Jean-Christophe Bureau; an examination of the proposed changes in the rural development regulation by Francesco Mantino; and a discussion of how co-decision is influencing the outcome of these negotiations by myself.
Because the presentations might be of more general interest, with the permission of the presenters I plan to link to them over the next few days. This post links to the presentations of Giovanni Anania and Jean-Christophe Bureau.
Giovanni Anania’s (University of Calabria) presentation here in his well-known technicolour style is in two parts. The first part consists of the actual presentation (time was short, so the number of slides which could be covered was limited).… Read the rest

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Wasting money on young farmers?

This post first appeared in the IIEA EnvironmentNexus blog.

One of the issues on the CAP reform agenda discussed at the last Agricultural Council meeting was whether the proposed young farmers’ payment in Pillar 1 should be a voluntary option for member states or not. The Council is arguing for a voluntary payment. Both the Commission and Parliament argue, on the contrary, that the payment should be mandatory.

Making this a mandatory payment could imply a three- to four-fold increase in CAP expenditure on young farmers. One might assume that such a substantial increase in expenditure would be justified by well-founded evidence of substantial gains in either generational renewal or farm productivity.

In fact, in proposing a general top-up of direct payments for young farmers in Pillar 1 the Commission ignores the advice of its own evaluations of assistance to young farmers. Despite the high profile campaign by CEJA, the European Council of Young Farmers, this payment is the wrong instrument addressing the wrong problem.… Read the rest

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Challenges of implementing networking and governance mechanisms in the EIP

This guest post is written by Doris Marquardt, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Regional Development and Location Management, EURAC, Bolzano, Italy.

The setting-up of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) ‘Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability’ as a new instrument under the rural development pillar in the next funding period has – in comparison to other elements in this CAP reform – so far not been the subject of contentious debate.
According to the draft regulation, the EIP is seen as a driver for innovation in the primary and food sectors. Added-value creation is expected by linking researchers and practitioners, promoting the transfer of new approaches into practice, informing the science community about research needs that matter “on the ground”, and by focussing existing policies on innovation. It is intended that the EIP will help build a competitive primary sector that secures sustainable global food and raw material availability. Dissemination of results (on innovation) and EU-wide networking should lead to gains for the sector as a whole.… Read the rest

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EU to ban reusable olive oil bottles in restaurants

Olive oil marketing regulations are at the centre of a political storm in the UK following newspaper reports that the EU Commission proposes to ban the use of olive oil jugs and dipping bowls in restaurants from 1 January 2014 (see, for example, the Daily Telegraph and Guardian reports).
The proposal is reminiscent of EU rules preventing the sale of crooked cucumbers (repealed in 2009). Apart from the substantive issues around the merits or otherwise of the proposal itself, the issue throws light on the working of the EU’s comitology system as well as raising questions about the balance between maintaining uniform conditions of competition within the EU while also respecting the principle of subsidiarity.
The proposal is found in a draft Commission implementing regulation amending an earlier implementing regulation on the marketing of olive oil in the Community. Part of the background to this regulation is the evidence of extensive fraud in the marketing of olive oil – olive oil is reputed to be the most adulterated agricultural product in the EU (see this interview with Tom Mueller in the New Yorker based on his book Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil).… Read the rest

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A race against time

Two important meetings as part of the process of agreeing a CAP reform took place earlier this week – the Agricultural Council on Monday and the Ecofin Council on Tuesday. The Agricultural Council meeting was notable for the success of the Irish Presidency in getting agreement on a compromise mandate on the Common Fisheries Policy reform after 36 hours of negotiations which it is hoped will be the basis for a political agreement with the Parliament before the end of the Irish Presidency in June.
We are not yet at the same point with the CAP reform dossier (see this recent update to the Irish Parliament by Simon Coveney, the Irish Minister representing the Council in the trilogue negotiations and this view from Mairead McGuinness, one of the shadow rapporteurs in the European Parliament). Both the Irish Presidency and the Agriculture Commissioner continue to make bullish pronouncements (as indeed they must) that an overall CAP package also acceptable to the European Parliament negotiators will be agreed at the next Agricultural Council in June.… Read the rest