The EU Commission's proposals for its 'Health Check' of the Common Agricultural Policy will take the CAP in the right direction, but do not go far enough in streamlining and simplifying the policy, says the NFU.
The Health Check is intended as a series of interim adjustments to the CAP, designed to reinforce the 2005 reforms and prepare the way for the further radical reform due in 2013. The NFU lobbied the Commission strongly in the run-up to the publication.
NFU President Peter Kendall said: "The great failure of the 2003 reform was to allow some governments to retain some partially decoupled support. Although the Commission has proposed severely to curtail partial decoupling in future, this does not go far enough, and we will now urge its total abolition.
"Meanwhile, the suggestion of scaling back larger single farm payments, however seductive, is also misguided. It would introduce more complexity instead of simplicity, especially as farmers would be bound to try to adjust their businesses in order to avoid its impact. The Commission itself does not seem convinced this is the right way forward, and the NFU calls for a rethink on this issue.
"The Health Check is intended to be an adjustment to the CAP, not another radical reform. The problem with the last reform in 2003 is that it made the CAP more complicated and less common. The Health Check should be an opportunity to correct those mistakes".
On a more positive note, the NFU strongly supports the following measures which should make for a more uniform European policy:
Simplifying and reducing the burdens of cross-compliance
The total abolition of set aside
A smooth transition to the abolition of dairy quotas by 2015
Higher European modulation, with corresponding cuts in national modulation
Offering countries the opportunity to revise their Single Payment Scheme (SPS) model before 2013 towards an area-based system
Meanwhile, the NFU welcomes the fact that issues vital to agriculture, like sustainable water management, climate change and biodiversity, are being addressed in the document. But NFU President Peter Kendall warned: "How effective we are at achieving environmental goals crucially depends on the types of measures taken to deal with the challenges. We would like to see more detail on how the Commission plans to integrate these issues further into the CAP".
