Dublin, 28/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - For the very first time, the Parliament and Council had an opportunity to confront their positions on reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP) at a meeting in Dublin on Monday 27 May. The informal discussion between European ministers and MEPs revealed that there were still confrontational issues to be resolved - such as the internal convergence of aid (redistribution of payments between farmers within each EU country), aid capping, sugar quotas, coupled aid - with less than one month to go before the Agriculture Council that is to seek to reach a political agreement on reform.
EU agriculture ministers invited the chairman of the European Parliament (EP) committee on agriculture, Paolo de Castro (S&D, Italy), and the rapporteurs, Luis Capoulas Santos (direct payments and rural development), Michel Dantin (single common market organisation) and Giovanni La Via (horizontal regulation), to take part.
The meeting took a format that was quite unprecedented, to correspond to an unprecedented situation: the introduction of co-decision for agriculture since the Lisbon Treaty. With five weeks to go before the end of its term of presidency, the Irish Presidency of the EU Council sought to take stock of the situation with a view to concluding an agreement on CAP reform in June.
De Castro felt that the negotiation underway between the Council and the EP on the multiannual financial framework 2014-2020 was closely linked to discussions on the CAP. The EP does not envisage an agreement on reform without agreement on the financial framework, he said. The agreement on CAP reform is also linked, the EP believes, to a horizontal agreement on application of delegated acts and execution (an agreement that is still overdue). Finally, the EP refuses a last minute agreement - the sort appreciated by Council. Most of the key points must be resolved so that only the truly political points are left to be settled during the last Council in June, the rapporteurs and De Castro said. The EP also stated its willingness to reach an agreement and its determination to fully implement the mandate entrusted to it, said Capoulas Santos. A question was raised by the EP concerning the Council mandate, and Dantin asked whether it was really a negotiating mandate or a position mandate.
EP rapporteurs took stock of the discussions after the last trialogues:
Rural development. Council, EP and Commission are close to agreement except on two points: - zones with natural constraints (the EP would like to know the consequences of applying biophysical criteria); - and the problem of double payment (the Council provides for this by taking into account agri-environmental measures in aid greening, while the EP and Commission are opposed to it).
Direct payments. On internal convergence, the EP and Council take stances along the same lines but the Commission remains firm (wanting a minimum threshold of 75%).
Coupled aid. According to MEPs, a compromise should be found in due course.
Single CMO. The EP considers there are many points of divergence that have not been settled in the trialogues, including: - recourse to Article 43(3) of the treaty that governs the exclusive prerogatives of the Council and for which the EP considers that some measures (reference prices) have political clout and must enter co-decision; - and market management, for which, as the EP states, measures must go beyond a simple safety net.
Horizontal regulation. There are differences over the payer bodies (EP and Commission hope to operate simplification by reducing their number, but the Council refuses).
Member states then intervened. Several ministers felt that it was now important to reach an agreement on reform that has been awaited by farmers for several years. If there is no agreement in June, the future will be unsettled and reform could be put off indefinitely, which would leave farmers in a situation of uncertainty (a remark made in particular by France, Austria, Denmark and Greece).
Internal converge remains a problem for quite a few countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal in particular), which consider that the Commission's proposal does not authorise transition that would be sufficiently smooth given transfers between types of production that this convergence will involve for countries that have very varied agriculture systems.
Several countries (France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Greece and Finland to name but a few) underlined the importance of coupled aid. Germany, in particular, stated everything that it disliked about coupled aid. The so-called liberal countries plus Germany stressed the fact that market measures must be limited to simply a safety net. Germany, Slovakia and the Czech Republic stated their opposition to capping and to the degressive nature of direct aid. Some countries (such as Portugal, Finland and Bulgaria) stated their specific concerns regarding sugar quotas and the reintroduction of refining capacities, while others (such as Portugal and Poland) said it was necessary to take better account of the upheavals caused by reform in the dairy sector.
The Commission was of the view that it was not necessary to link an agreement on the CAP to a more general agreement on the multiannual financial framework, otherwise one would run the risk of putting off decisions of importance for farmers.
The meeting demonstrated the huge amount of work still to be done before an agreement can be reached. It would appear that some protagonists in the talks are dubious about the Presidency's optimism that an agreement can be reached end June. (LC/transl.jl)