Wisdom prevailed in the end. It all happened so fast. Contrary to expectations, the current European Commission will not be approving its guidance document on reforming the EU budget and changing the shape of EU spending in the future. It will now fall to the Barroso II Commission, in its first six months of office, to approve the budget and therein determine the shape of Europe in the future. José Manuel Barroso informed the chair of the EP's budgets committee, Alain Lamassoure, about this, and Lamassoure then told the plenary (see issue 10018). Four years ago, of course, the EP and the Council planned for big changes to EU expenditure (in the form of the multiannual financial perspectives and the annual budget) to be made in 2009 but in the meantime, the Lisbon Treaty is coming into force and there have been delays in the new European Commission taking up office. Lamassoure said that this made it “wiser” for the new Commission to “present its political programme and its financing at the same time”. This wisdom has prevailed.
Alain Lamassoure said it was not a good idea to opine on the actual content of the controversial budget and this makes sense because it is not the EP's job to criticise a document that does not formally exist. In my column, I can express myself more freely - I discussed the budget plans in issue 10017, explaining that most of the suggestions and guidelines are viable (on EU own resources, budget flexibility and the like), setting out the gripes and often virulent protests about the cohesion policy and the common agricultural policy.
Arguments in favour of cohesion policy. I do not have any further comments as such, but I would like to make two things clear. I thought it likely that EU Regional Policy Commissioner Pawe³ Samecki would be part of the new Barroso Commission - right from the start he has made it clear that he was only a stop-gap commissioner. This gives his plain-speaking about the basic issues even more weight. He said that the crucial role of cohesion policy is “often ignored these days”, but it has to be boosted in the future in order to make European integration a reality on the ground (see issue 10013). The EP's regional development committee held a lively debate (see issue 10012) in which it emerged that the regional policy commissioner and the EP see eye-to-eye on the issue.
Centre stage for the EP's agriculture committee. The second point I would like to clarify is the role of the EP's agriculture committee. It has not formally included discussion of the “non-existent document” on its agenda but it did take advantage of a workshop on the future of the CAP last Tuesday (organised by the committee's chair, Paolo De Castro) to discuss matters with the EU agriculture commissioner, details of which can be found in issue 10017 of our newsletter. Albert Dess (EPP) said that farming directly affects all Europeans, not just farmers, and the EU has to ensure everyone's food requirements are met; Green MEP Martin Häusling said that first and foremost, the CAP's objectives had to be decided upon and only then should the budget to achieve these objectives be set out; Socialist Stéphane Le Foll said that the CAP's objectives should cover environmental protection, social development and food security. The EU agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer Boel, pointed out that it was not her own department at the Commission that drafted the controversial document (an elegant way of disowning it) and that any changes to the CAP should strengthen rather than weaken the policy so that it can help ensure food security in the EU and the rest of the world, manage the landscape, halt the decline in biodiversity, help deal with climate change and ensure balanced development of the countryside in Europe. She warned the MEPs that that they should be on their guard as plenty of mouths are watering at the prospect of getting hold of some of the farm budget.
Paolo De Castro explained the concerns about the draft document, adding that at the next plenary (in Strasbourg next week), the agriculture committee would be asking an oral question of the European Commission to find out what it thinks about handing back responsibility over CAP spending to the member states (see issue 10018).
A somewhat bewildering document. This raises the question of how and why departments at the European Commission set the cat amongst the pigeons by laying down potential policies that would rob essential aspects of EU solidarity of their meaning. I will answer this question tomorrow.
(F.R./transl.fl)