At their informal meeting in Tallinn on Tuesday 5 September, EU farm ministers highlighted the need for instruments to manage crises and risks in agriculture to be strengthened in future.
They did not, however, produce any innovative ideas on how to improve these instruments and were divided over convergence of direct aid.
Crisis reserve. Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan pointed out that the crisis reserve is not a risk management or crisis measure as such but a tool to get extra financing for market support measures. “Member states have shown great reluctance to use it”, he said and the Commission will take this into account when bringing forward its proposals on the EU’s post-2020 multiannual financial framework (MFF), he made clear.
At the meeting, some countries, including the Netherlands and Ireland, were critical of the said crisis reserve. Italy noted, too, that the mechanism had not been a success. For Germany, the reserve is a good idea but it is not enough to address the problems. Greece, Spain and Poland backed the idea advanced by the Estonian Presidency that unused crisis reserve money be retained rather than returned to the member states.
The Estonian Presidency’s summation of the situation was that ministers were coming to the conclusion “that the crisis reserve needs to be revised to make a swifter more flexible system”.
Several ministers argued for the retention in future of the direct payments system, as Commissioner Hogan would also prefer.
Harmonisation/convergence of aid. Estonian Agriculture Minister Tarmo Tamm acknowledged the differences in views on harmonisation and the convergence of aid. The Estonian Presidency supports both, and was backed by the Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, Romanian and Bulgarian ministers. The Netherlands on the other hand was against, while Denmark suggested that this eminently political matter was quite separate from the issue of crisis- and risk-management tools.
CAP after 2020. Commissioner Hogan stated that risk management will be one of the key points of the new common agricultural policy (CAP). The communication on simplifying and modernising the CAP (expected for the end of November) “will provide the occasion for an in-depth reflection”, he said. Some proposals on specific instruments have already been put forward in the omnibus regulation, in particular, to incentivise the use of mutual funds. The Commission’s proposal also includes a sector-specific income stabilisation tool with a lower triggering threshold of 20%, rather than 30%, to better address crisis situations. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)