On Thursday 20 November, the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee will vote to approve the provisional agreement with the Council on simplifying certain rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The co-legislators agreed to raise the aid ceiling for small farmers, with an annual payment of up to €3,000 (€2,500 in the initial proposal). They have increased the ceiling for the new one-off investment aid to €75,000 (€50,000 initially proposed). Member States will be able to determine the extent to which partially organic farms can be considered as automatically complying with certain Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC).
Parliament’s requests to remove the obligations linked to GAEC 5 (protection of soil against erosion) and GAEC 9 (protection of permanent grassland) were rejected, as was the MEPs’ wish to consider farmers whose farms are located in a Natura 2000 area as automatically complying with GAEC standards 1 to 7. The Council and Parliament still have to formally adopt the text, with a view to it coming into force in early 2026 (see EUROPE 13750/16).
Link to the text of the agreement: https://aeur.eu/f/jij (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)