European leaders to meet over CAP budget proposals

European leaders will meet in Brussels this week to try and reach a unanimous agreement on the EU's long term budget for the period 2014-2020.

The amount of money assigned to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and a number of policy concerns relating to the future CAP are among the issues to be discussed.

"We have said all along that it would be unrealistic for us to expect the CAP to be exempt from the austerity measures that are being applied throughout the European Union" said NFU director of policy Martin Haworth in Brussels.

"What is key to us is that whatever settlement is finally reached, the terms and conditions applied to our farmers must not put us at a disadvantage with our major competitors."

"Specifically we expect our Government to treat English and Welsh farmers equitably and to ensure that they can operate on a level playing field with our main competitors in the rest of Europe."

EU farm policy reform must distribute funding more fairly and make 'greening' measures flexible while cutting red tape the EU Agriculture Committee said in January as it moved forward with its draft CAP proposals.

The Common Agricultural Policy must be properly funded to continue to ensure secure supply of high-quality food to EU citizens and enable farmers to protect the environment better, said MEPs who voted on the four legislative proposals.

Farm groups have expressed concern over the UK's negotiations to have powers to move up to 20% of the money at national level from the UK's direct payments envelope into its rural development envelope.

"This would hit our farmers far harder than any cuts that are applied fairly and equally across all European farmers" said Haworth.

EU leaders are also set to discuss some policy concerns relating to the future CAP. Previous versions of the 'negotiating box' outline plans to make capping voluntary for member states and to introduce flexibility around plans to ‘green’ the direct payments.

Farm groups have said they would prefer capping was struck out from the future CAP.

MEPs endorsed Commission proposals to cap direct payments to any one farm at €300,000, and reduce payments to those receiving between €250,000 and €300,000 by 70%, and payments to those receiving between €200,000 and €250,000 by 40%.

Payments to farms receiving between €150,000 and €200,000 would be cut by 20%

Other amendments, seeking to reduce payments to bigger farms even further or on the contrary calling for the capping to be completely rejected, failed to win the support of a majority in committee.

MEPs nonetheless adapted the rules proposed by the Commission so as to exclude cooperatives and other groups of farmers who distribute payments received to their members (AM770) and ensure that capped money remains in the region where it was capped and is used for rural development programmes.

"We interpret the negotiating text to mean that any suggestion of stepped reduction to larger payments, along with the overall ceiling at €300,000 as proposed, would become voluntary" said the NFU.

"We are absolutely opposed to payments being reduced in either of these ways and negotiators should ensure, at the very least, that both are left to the discretion of member states."

The centerpiece of CAP reform remains the greening of direct payments.

New environmental rules - which will make 30% of national budgets for direct payments conditional upon compliance with greening measures - must be made more flexible, the MEPs said.

There were three key measures: crop diversification, maintaining permanent pasture and creating ecologically focused areas will remain but with exceptions.

MEPs made clear that farms with under 10 ha of arable land should be exempt and the rules should be relaxed for holdings of 10 - 30 ha.

"We asked MEPs to make the greening proposals more workable and to ensure that the efforts of farmers already in agri-environment schemes was taken into consideration. We asked that if a farmer chose not to do the greening requirements, that he would only lose his greening payment" said Deputy President of the NFU Meurig Raymond.

"We asked for changes to the way in which entitlements will operate in the future CAP and a properly functioning national reserve."

Farms that are certified under national of regional environmental certification schemes, and hence are already using environment-friendly practices, would be exempt from 'greening' provided that the measures they apply have an impact that is at least equivalent to that which the mandatory greening ones would have.

"We have managed to bring greening into the first pillar of the CAP, making it possible for every farmer in the EU, not just those in countries that can afford to fund it under rural development programmes. This greening is clearly subject to EU rules, and now needs to be paid for by real EU money for a public good", Luis Manuel Capoulas Santos said.

"We believe that if member states are given greater flexibility in implementing ‘greening’ that this flexibility should also be passed on to farmers" said Martin Haworth.

"Giving farmers the choice in how to implement greening to suit their own situation is key to ensuring that greening is implemented in the most cost effective way at farm level and avoids the threat of individual countries using the ‘flexibility’ to gold plate the requirements."