On Thursday 13 March in Strasbourg, Members of the European Parliament welcomed the ideas contained in the ‘Vision for Agriculture and Food’ presented by the European Commission on 19 February (see EUROPE 13586/12). They were fairly united on the need to maintain the structure and size of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget and to introduce reciprocity measures for agricultural products imported into Europe. It was on the reform of the direct payments system in particular that MEPs showed their differences.
In his speech (https://aeur.eu/f/fwu ) to MEPs, European Commissioner Christophe Hansen said that the ‘vision’ presented by the Commission was “the beginning of further cooperation and dialogue to develop the initiatives together”.
Reciprocity. The vision sets out the need to bring EU production standards more into line with those that apply to imports (for pesticides and animal welfare). Dangerous pesticides banned in the EU “should not be allowed back into the EU via imports”, insisted Mr Hansen. “We expected the vision to be about reciprocity, and it is”, said Valérie Hayer (Renew Europe, French).
Luke Ming Flanagan (The Left, Irish) said that the EU/Mercosur agreement “will undermine our food sovereignty, reduce the price our farmers get for their beef, increase our dependence on imported feed and lead to environmental destruction”. “It’s not a vision, it’s short-sightedness”, quipped Mr Flanagan.
Budget. Dario Nardella (S&D, Italian) felt that “without adequate resources, we will have no vision and we will have no common agricultural policy either”. He rejected any reduction in resources for agriculture and any “centralisation of funds”.
Herbert Dorfmann (EPP, Italian) (see EUROPE 13598/10) stressed that, “to implement the vision, you need money”.
Raffaele Stancanelli (PfE, Italian) would have liked the Commission to “clarify the direction that European agriculture will take after the many negative points of the last legislature”. He regretted the absence of any mention in the vision of the volume of CAP funds for 2028-2034, and criticised the plan to incorporate CAP funds after 2027 into a “national fund managed under the blackmail of the cross-compliance mechanism, which has revealed all its limitations”.
The CAP budget is not guaranteed, warned Thomas Waitz (Greens/EFA, Austrian).
Direct payments. Mr Stancanelli asked what the future held for direct payments. He expressed concern about a possible new distribution mechanism for those most in need of support: “There is no explanation for this in the vision, and it is unacceptable”, he said, before calling for direct payments to be stepped up.
For Veronika Vrecionová (ECR, Czech), “we need to direct aid where it makes the most sense, i.e. towards farmers who take care of the land and the countryside and, above all, who provide quality food”. For that reason, she supported the capping and degression measures relating to direct payments. “We cannot continue to subsidise large farms at the expense of the small and medium-sized farms that keep the countryside alive”, said Ms Vrecionová.
Thomas Waitz reiterated his position on the introduction of income support based on the number of jobs offered by farmers: there are winegrowers who, thanks to direct marketing, can provide two full-time jobs with five hectares, whereas sometimes farmers with 50 or 80 hectares are not even able to provide one full-time job. This is why Mr Waitz welcomes the references in the vision to the need “to allocate part of the basic income support budget according to the number of jobs that a farm actually provides”.
Simplification. “We don’t want deregulation, but good simplification, because the law of the strongest is not the right one”, qualified Mr Nardella, referring to the simplification work requested by most MEPs. Christophe Hansen has confirmed that he will be presenting proposals for simplifying the CAP rules in April, and that simplification work will be carried out on policies other than the CAP by the end of 2025.
Mr Hansen confirmed that a proposal to support the wine sector, which is “under pressure”, would be presented in April (see EUROPE 13595/6). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)