On Monday 17 October, the European Commission adopted amending letter no. 1 for 2017, which increases expenditure by €1.257 billion in commitments and €523.1 million in payments.
This amending letter adjusts the draft 2017 budget presented by the European Commission in the following areas: agriculture and fisheries, competitiveness and the new partnership for migration.
Agriculture. The amending letter updates the requirements for agriculture in 2017 and incorporates the financing of the anti-crisis aid package of July of this year (€500 million). Taking account of the new requirements and additional revenue allocated to the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF), the level of commitment appropriations remains unchanged and that of payment appropriations drops slightly (-€1 million).
Mid-term revision of the MFF. The amending letter sets to music the additional credits earmarked by the Commission for 2017 in the mid-term revision of the multi-annual financial framework (MFF) 2014-2020: +€200 million in commitments (€7 million in payments) for heading 1a, 'competitiveness' (€50 million in commitments for the Horizon 2020 programme, €50 million for the COSME programme to support SMEs, €50 million for the Connecting Europe Facility, €50 million for Erasmus+, €20 million, through a redeployment of funds for the programme WiFi4EU); +€1 billion under heading 4, 'Europe in the world', to tackle the root causes of migration and promote the implementation of agreements with third countries. To do this, the Commission is proposing to increase the commitment appropriations by €1 billion and the payment appropriations by €210 million. Given the very low level of available margin in heading 4, the majority of the increase in commitment appropriations will be paid for by mobilising the 'contingency margin', to be done by using unallocated margin in headings 2 (agriculture) and 5 (administrative expenses).
Lastly, the Commission is planning to mobilise €500 million in commitments for 2017 for the Youth Employment Initiative. However, it is not at this stage proposing the budgetary allocations for this, as it plans to pay for it out of the Global Margin for Commitments (technical adjustment for 2017). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)