Brussels, 02/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - Simplification of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be discussed by EU agriculture ministers on 16 March. In this perspective, Commissioner Phil Hogan is calling for member states to send him their proposals but warned, however, that basic political decisions made during the 2013 reforms had, in principle, to stay in place.
The EU agricultural cooperative organisations (Copa-Cogeca) also consider that simplification of the CAP should not affect the political compromise on reform. They have drawn up a non-exhaustive list of the areas in which they believe this exercise should be carried out: definition of a working farmer; greening (diversification of crops, management requirements for land surfaces of ecological interest, intercropping, conversion and weighting coefficients, definition of permanent grassland); requests for assistance (transition to online requests); the number and scale of controls; tolerance levels allowed for the first years of applying the reformed CAP.
Tolerance requested for greening
Udo Hemmerling, chairman of Copa-Cogeca's new working party on “Direct payments and greening under the new CAP”, insisted, “The risk of unintentional errors during the first years of implementing the CAP will therefore be high, which would automatically cause payments to be cut. Since it is already too late to provide greater clarity on the rules, there must consequently be a certain amount of tolerance in the first years vis a vis cuts in greening payments. On-farm visits to advise and help farmers to implement the greening rules correctly and deliver the desired environmental benefits are crucial”. (LC)