Brussels, 21/06/2011 (Agence Europe) - Little by little, work is moving forward on the subject of aligning common agricultural policy (CAP) texts on the Lisbon Treaty. Trialogues (composed of Commission, Parliament and Council) are scheduled on texts relating to CAP financing, rural development and direct payments.
On the subject of the CAP financing legislation discussed on Monday 20 June within the Special Agriculture Committee (SAC), the trialogue is expected to take place on 13 July, under Polish presidency of the EU Council. The Hungarian Presidency hopes to ensure that the negotiating brief granted to the future Presidency will be sufficiently broad. Four working group sessions have allowed an overall Council agreement to be reached on this text. Despite everything, a number of problematic issues remain. For example, the provision suggested by the Presidency to apply Article 5§4 of the new comitology regulation (182/2011) in a recurring manner in the event of no decision being reached by the management committee (Article 5§4 stipulates that the Commission cannot adopt the text and that the appeals committee should be referred to) is challenged by the Commission. It believes that systematic recourse to this provision originally intended to be applied in exceptional cases is of a kind that would slow down the system. On this, the Commission is backed by a number of member states including the United Kingdom and Italy. This subject is recurrent in the work of alignment and is expected to cause friction with the European Parliament in the future. Furthermore, Parliament Amendment 6 suggests that, for the financing of rural development programmes mentioned in the text, there should be greater flexibility with regard to regional management (this mainly concerns member states with strong regional organisation).
To sum up, if not completely used up by a region, such financing could be recovered at national level before possibly being redistributed at regional level. Some countries with strong regional organisation are in favour of this, such as Italy and Spain. Others await clarification, while some have doubts about the legal wording of the article, and others, like Poland and Ireland, are quite obviously opposed.
Direct payments. The proposal on direct payments (alignment of provisions to the Lisbon Treaty) was discussed at the SAC on 14 June. It will be discussed in greater detail during the next trialogue, on Wednesday 22 June. A common position put together by the Presidency is gradually taking shape. Subjects most covered by discussion concern the use of implementing acts involving member states in a “comitology” procedure instead of delegated acts which essentially depend on the Commission. This is the case for: - 1) Article 6 (permanent prairies) for which a majority of countries are in favour of implementing acts rather than delegated acts as proposed by the Commission. The Commission reserves itself the possibility to ask member states to keep a share of permanent prairies via delegated act. The majority of member states (including Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands) consider this is a measure that affects practice in member states and that, because of this, it should be via an implementing act; 2) Single Payment Scheme (SPS) (amendment of Article 45a) and conditions for right to payments (amendment of Article 62a). The Commission proposal provides implementing acts for the “new” member states passing from the Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS) to the Single Payment Scheme (62a), while provisions for application of the SPS in the “older” EU countries come under delegated acts. The Presidency echoes the position held by a majority of member states (including France, Spain, Belgium, Poland and Denmark), which would like these provisions to be made coherent and which, they believe, should come under implementing acts in both cases.
Rural development. The text on support for rural development will also be on the agenda of the next trialogue on 22 June. The Presidency above all plans to align a number of similar provisions between the direct payment text and this one, particularly on follow-up of failure to apply sanctions below €100 (Article 51§2) and follow-up of minor infringements (Article 51§4). (L.C./transl.jl)