On Thursday 5 July, the European Parliament’s agriculture committee named its rapporteurs for each of the three legislative proposals on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after 2020.
Esther Herranz García (EPP, Spain) will have responsibility for the main text, on future strategic plans. The Parliamentary rapporteur on the common organisation of the market (CMO) will be Éric Andrieu (S&D, France) and Ulrike Müller (ALDE, Germany) will be in charge of the text on financing and management of expenditure.
“In view of the increasingly frequent sanitary and climate crises and the volatility of prices that make the position of today’s farmers particularly vulnerable, we must lower the thresholds for triggering all risk management instruments”, Andrieu commented. Another goal, he said, will be to extend derogations to competition rules to all agricultural sectors.
Ambitious agenda. Parliament hopes to be able to reach a position at first reading on the legislative proposals on the CAP before the European elections in May 2019. The last plenary session of the current Parliament will be from 15 to 18 April next year.
Environment committee enters the field. The Conference of the Presidents of the European Parliament decided on Thursday 5 July partially to accede to the calls of the environment committee, granting it shared (not exclusive) competence on a number of Articles in the legislative proposal on strategic plans.
This means that amendments lodged by members of the environment committee on the Articles in question could, if they were to be rejected by their opposite numbers on the agriculture committee, be put directly to the vote in plenary session.
On the other hand, the environment committee will be able only to offer an opinion on the proposal on the common organisation of the market.
The Greens/EFA group in Parliament called for greater powers to be given to the environment committee (exclusive competence on a number of issues). The EU farming and agricultural cooperative organisations, Copa and Cogeca, on the other hand, advocated full responsibility for the agriculture committee over the CAP reform proposals. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)