Brussels, 04/10/2013 (Agence Europe) - The way the French president, François Hollande, set out the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on Wednesday 2 October is not universally shared in France and although the powerful FNSEA seems happy with it, grain producers and smaller farmers' groups are disappointed.
FNSEA is the biggest farm organisation in France, accounting for more than half of farmers' votes. It is a powerful federation backed by a number of specialist associations that the French socialist government cannot ignore. When Hollande unveiled his vision of the CAP for 2014-2020 on 2 October, people like José Bové, MEP and former leader of Confédération Paysanne, said that the FNSEA was hiding behind the president. FNSEA did welcome the president's ideas, with FNSEA president Xavier Beulin pointing out the desire to have a competitive, high-performance agriculture and back livestock farming in France. This was rather positive given that the French president validated the measure that would give an extra premium to the first 52 hectares of any farm, a measure that favours small and medium-sized farms and which FNSEA had fought tooth and nail.
Within FNSEA, however, some farmers are unhappy, particularly arable farmers, because by shifting nearly €1billion in favour of livestock farming and moving towards a more even payment of aid per hectare (converging on 70%, whereby each farm could be granted at least 70% of the national average per hectare), Hollande has exposed high-performance and arable farmers to heavy losses of revenue and an unbearably uneven playing field, explained arable associations AGPB and AGPM.
The first livestock farmers to react seem broadly happy with the reform plans. The Fédération Nationale Ovine (FNO) welcomed it as a “compromise” that was favourable to livestock farming overall. But smaller farmers' groups are disappointed. Coordination Rurale, a rather right-wing association (like agriculture as a whole with the exception of Confédération Paysanne) said that the planned CAP is only a stop-gap political vision without any strategic input. Confédération Paysanne had high hopes, noting that the measure to increase the premium for the first 52 hectares is a measure put forward by Stephane Le Foll, which he proudly demanded of Brussels, along with the option of spending 30% of the budget on it. All the same, says Confederation Paysanne, the funding will be restricted to 20% of the direct aid budget in order not to over-penalise big farmers' income, and convergence has also been reduced to a target of only 70% in 2019, which will keep the unfair system in place. It had hoped that France would have gone for convergence of 100%.
France is the main beneficiary of the CAP. It will have €63.7 billion for 2014-2020 to share out among farmers. Some €7.7 billion of direct aid each year under the first pillar, plus €1.2 billion in development aid under the second pillar. It received €9.3 billion from the CAP in 2013.
Under Hollande's plans, France's priority is to defend livestock farming by making use of levers to ensure better targeting of aid. Nearly a billion euros of CAP aid a year will be channelled into livestock farming by 2019. France also wants to back livestock farming with “coupled aid” (increasing coupled aid from 10% to 15% of the first pillar's budget, introducing a dairy cow premium and aid for fattening up animals, €150 million to move towards autonomous feed production by aiding the production of vegetable proteins (alfalfa and other protein plants). It also plans to encourage young people to enter farming (1% of aid under the first pillar, in other words €75 million, to help 10,000 farms, and €25 million more under the second pillar); improve risk prevention and management; encourage ecological transition of farming (doubling the budget for agri-environmental measures and doubling the budget for organic farming); support work and jobs on all farms (a higher proportion of aid for the first 52 hectares to account for 20% of aid under the first pillar, gradually introduced from 2015 to 2018; and reducing the gap between farms by abandoning the historic references system through gradual convergence of aid to achieve 70% convergence in 2019 with a cap of 30% on individual farms' losses as a result of convergence). (LC/transl.fl)