A technical note from the European Parliament’s agriculture committee assesses the implications of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU for the common agricultural policy (CAP) and the “highly sensitive” political decisions to be taken by the 27 member states on how to finance it (see EUROPE 11708).
“It is obvious that Brexit will lead to a significant gap in the financing of the CAP once the UK contributions, on the one hand, and the expenditures related to British agriculture, on the other, have been removed”, states the agriculture committee note, signed by its chair Czeslaw Adam Siekierski (EPP, Poland) and intended to inform Parliamentary reflection on Brexit. Parliament is due to vote in April on a political resolution on the UK’s exit from the EU.
A recent paper on the subject assesses the gap at between €1.2 billion and €3.1 billion, “if the EU wants to maintain its current spending levels for the remaining 27 Member States”, the note says.
For the agriculture committee, “what matters fundamentally is the budgetary envelopes that will remain available to finance the CAP in its current form (that resulting from the reform in 2013) and/or to finance the future CAP (as it may result from the next reform)”, depending on when the UK leaves the EU. This will depend on three important factors, the note states: - the willingness (or not) of the remaining member states to increase their contributions to the EU budget to compensate wholly or partially for the UK withdrawal; - the willingness (or not) of the budgetary authorities to continue allocating the same proportion (around 39%) of the EU budget to the CAP (taking account of a clear political will to finance new policies or to reinforce existing ones); - the shape of the new CAP (post-2020) that will emerge from the next reform process “with mechanisms (direct payments, market measures and rural development) which may increase or decrease the need for financing from the EU budget”.
“Needless to say, these three factors are closely interlinked and highly sensitive from a political perspective”, the note states.
See: http://bit.ly/2lzg7Vb (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)