Brussels, 26/02/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 23 February, the European Commission announced that it will start work from scratch on the draft simplification of wine labelling and marketing rules.
Faced with criticism from MEPs and producers of wines of origin, the Commission will withdraw its draft regulation on simplification for the common market organisation (CMO) for wine. Director of DG Agriculture with responsibility for this issue, Joost Korte, informed MEPs on the European Parliament's agriculture committee, telling them that the Commission does not have the desire to challenge the substance of current legislation and it was a mistake to put the document on the negotiating table because it was misunderstood. The document foresaw replacing the current regulation with a dozen or more texts from which a number of measures protecting wines of origin had disappeared. The proposed document questioned the political agreements of 2008 and 2013, explained the MEPs, some of them saying that some of the proposals incorporated negotiators' views word for word. Joost Korte said they weren't in a hurry but there is a requirement to split the legislation in two (delegated acts and implementation acts) because otherwise they'd open themselves up to court cases.
Fruit and vegetables. The talks on amplifying national aid programmes for fruit, vegetables and wine and aligning them with the Lisbon Treaty are progressing well. Joost Korte nevertheless regretted that the European Parliament's experts, who are invited each time to attend the meetings, rarely turn up. He urged the agriculture committee to organise itself better and follow the work as it progresses, rather than to argue their case when the texts have almost been finalised.
Simplification of the fruit and vegetables sector focuses in particular on producer organisations (PO): the minimum number of members, rules for marketing products outside PO and environmental requirements. It is very important to ensure that these activities are really possible and for them to have as much clarity as possible to avoid alerting the competition authorities, explained Joost Korte. The question of cooperatives that are members of PO, as is frequently the case in Italy, is problematic because they sell their products both within and outside the PO. On environmental requirements, the regulation requires 10% of the Operational Programme budget to devoted to them. In order to harmonise the rules on application of this demand within the EU, the Commission suggests giving PO flexibility by requiring that half of their members introduce action for the environment. The Commission says it is open to discussion on this point.
Entry and withdrawal prices. The next text also proposes a review of the entry price system for tomatoes coming mostly from Morocco. The Commission proposes moving from setting the entry price (which determines the price at which exporters can enter the EU market) from daily to weekly. The three most affected member states (France, Italy and Spain), along with Morocco itself, are unhappy with the proposal, which shows that we had to touch the core of the problem, explained the director of DG Agri. Nothing has yet been decided in this connection, however. Many MEPs from Spain called for the withdrawal price to be raised to cover farmers' prices. The Commission is not planning to change this measure, feeling that compensation should not be too high because otherwise it would turn into a market for producers. The European Commission wants to simplify the rules by reducing the 200-odd CMO acts of legislation. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)