European Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan sought to reassure EU farm ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday 16 July, concerned that the complexity of the proposals on the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (see EUROPE 12043) could weigh heavily on their national administrations and on farmers.
Hogan said that, since he had been in post, there had been five major simplifications and that the Commission would do all in its power to continue along the same path in the new post-2020 CAP. The goal, he said, was fewer rules and fewer exceptions, with measures that best meet farmers’ needs. “We have, therefore, identified three categories of measures: those to be implemented at EU level to ensure the CAP remains a common policy; those to be implemented at member-state level in order to provide greater flexibility; and, lastly, those that will no longer be necessary”. The commissioner provided a number of concrete, detailed examples of the simplification he foresees for: young farmers (single definition), environmental measures, direct payments, rural development (reducing the number of eligibility criteria), checks, insurance and performance follow-up indicators (which will be cut from the current 200 to around 100).
Benefits of new technologies. Lastly, Hogan spoke at length of all that new technologies can bring: “The use of new technologies also plays an important role in this context, since it will simplify, speed-up and automate many of the administrative procedures. The future CAP will use a system based on systematic, year-round remote observation of agricultural activity. This will serve the dual purpose of ensuring, at a comparatively low cost, the availability of EU-wide comprehensive and comparable data for policy monitoring purposes as well as making many on-the-spot checks redundant”. To provide support for his comments, the commissioner was accompanied by Vladimír Šucha, Director General of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), who set out for ministers all that technologies such as the Copernicus satellite system, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence can do to simplify the work of farmers.
Franco-German position. Speaking first, the French and German ministers briefly presented a joint statement, which also has the support of Portugal, the Czech Republic, Greece, Romania, Belgium and Slovakia, on the future of the CAP. This statement rejects the planned budget cuts after 2020 and calls for funding to be maintained at its current level for the 27 member states. France and Germany also feel that the European Commission’s proposals for the new CAP currently lack reasonable assurance of simplification. The joint statement also highlights the importance of high environmental targets and of the second pillar, and stresses the need for improvement of risk management instruments based on a voluntary approach from the member states.
In his contribution, French minister Stéphane Travert also called on the European Commission to build in a two-year transition period for full implementation of the new CAP.
Too much detail sought. Spain made the point that simplification was not just a matter for the European Commission but also for national administrations and farmers. A number of member states, including Latvia, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, took the same tack, calling for national plans – which to have to be approved by the Commission – not to have to be too detailed.
Lastly, some member states, which include Romania, Latvia and Poland, are still fearful that the new CAP will bring renationalisation with it, casting a shadow over the single market with the concomitant risk of distortion of competition.
A large number of expert working groups have been set up within the Council to take forward these points (and the other regulations of the proposal), which will be discussed once again at the next meeting of agriculture ministers at the end of September at an informal Council in Austria and then in Luxembourg in October.