The Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU will present its progress report on the state of negotiations on the post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on 18 June in Luxembourg (see EUROPE 12268/3, 12268/2).
For the Romanian Presidency, it is time to face the obvious: it will not be able to obtain a partial agreement between the Member States on the future CAP before the end of its mandate on 30 June. Many EU Agriculture Ministers, meeting in Bucharest on 3 and 4 June for an informal meeting, opposed this, considering that they lack visibility at this stage on the budget available to the CAP for the period 2021-2027.
The Romanian Minister of Agriculture, Petre Daea, acknowledged, after the informal meeting, that he would only be able to present a progress report to his counterparts on 18 June in Luxembourg. The Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU, which will take over from the Presidency on 1 July, will inherit the dossier with a view to trying to reach a full agreement by the end of 2019.
Romania has already put forward several compromise texts amending the initial proposals on the three regulations (Strategic Plan, common market organisation and Horizontal Regulation), as well as a guidance document on 'landing zones', i.e. possible points of agreement on the most sensitive elements. The CMO and the Horizontal Regulation are agreed, but “there is still work to be done on the Strategic Plan, as all this is linked to the decision on the Multiannual Financial Framework”, explained the Romanian Minister for Agriculture. And since many Member States consider these three texts as “one and the same package”, it is not possible to go any further, he admitted.
More work to be done. The progress report, dated 7 June, confirms the need to continue discussions on several important issues, such as aid conditionality rules, the exemption of small farmers from conditionality rules, the mandatory or voluntary nature of ecological programmes (eco-schemes) under the first pillar (direct aid and market expenditure) of the CAP, the level of coupled support (those that remain linked to product levels), risk management tools, and the €2,000 threshold for financial discipline (aid reduction).
The only point of agreement is that most delegations want to exclude investments in irrigation from rural development support, which are incompatible with the objective of good status of water bodies required by the European directive in this area. For its part, the European Commission has repeatedly expressed doubts about the Romanian Presidency's draft compromises, fearing, above all, a weakening of the environmental ambition of its proposal (green architecture).
To consult the Romanian Presidency's progress report on the CAP: https://bit.ly/2KEnj1r (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)