Brussels, 15/03/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 20 March, EU agriculture ministers will debate during a working lunch, funding criteria and distribution methods in the first (direct aid) and second (rural development) pillars of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the post-2013 period. Some countries, such as Denmark and France, consider that discussions on the partial redistribution of direct payments between member states (advocated by the European Commission in its reform proposals) must incorporate the question of distributing aid from the second pillar, namely, the envelope containing the proposed €89.9 billion for the 2014-2020 period.
During the EU Agriculture Council meeting on 14 November last, the partial redistribution of payments between member states, such as envisaged by the European Commission within the context of CAP reform, was given a very cool response by certain countries, which would lose out from the changes. Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and Luxembourg want it to be a matter of national budget envelopes and want Community funding for rural development to also be taken into account in the calculations. On 15 December last, during discussions on the reform, Belgian, Spanish, French, Latvian, Italian and Greek ministers declared that they were impatient for the Commission to present its project for distributing the €89.9 billion envelope for rural development during the 2014-2020 period between the EU member states.
To prepare the ministerial debates, the Danish presidency of the Union presented a scoreboard, on 12 March, to experts from the Special Agricultural Committee (SAC) demonstrating that: 1) the amount of direct payments (forecast for 2017 on the basis of existing legislation), which is on average €268/ha in the EU and varies between €95/ha in Latvia and €457 in the Netherlands (€696 in Malta), with €229 in Spain, €296 in France, €319 in Germany, €363 in Denmark and €405 in Italy: 2) aid for rural development (2013 forecasts), €89/ha average in the EU, ranging from €27/ha in the United Kingdom to €255 in Slovenia, €40 in Denmark, €48 in France, €61 in Spain, and €82 in Germany (€1,455 in Malta!).
Delegations from certain big countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain) and certain new EU countries gave their support to the presidency's figures, considering them quite appropriate. On the other hand, several countries (Austria, Finland, Portugal, Slovenia, Romania, etc.) considered that the scoreboard did not reflect the situation in so far as the final amount includes “apples and pears”, namely, direct payments and rural development aid. They claimed, for example, that rural development does not only cover agricultural measures. Several member states (Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Ireland, etc.) said that, for rural development, it would be preferable to have the 2007-2013 average for aid rather than a simple figure for 2013. (LC/transl.fl)