After months of negotiations, France, supported by around 15 EU Member States, won its case on 17 April at a meeting of the Committee of Representatives of the Member States to the European Union (Coreper) on the bodies responsible for defining a farmer (see EUROPE 13813/7).
At this Coreper meeting, the Cyprus Presidency of the Council proposed, without any opposition from the delegations, that the definition of a farmer, transferred from the regulation establishing the future ‘National and Regional Partnership Plans’ (NRPP) 2028-2034 to that relating to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2027, should be decided by the EU Council’s working groups of agricultural experts.
The issue was above all an institutional one. The Cyprus Presidency of the Council initially wanted to keep this definition “in brackets”, i.e. to include it in the cross-cutting negotiation document on the post-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), drawn up by an ad hoc group under the supervision of the EU Budget Ministers and Heads of State or Government. In the end, Nicosia proposed extracting it from the group and assigning the dossier to the group on horizontal agricultural issues under the responsibility of the agriculture ministers.
Once agreed, the definition of a farmer will be mirrored in the NRPP regulation. As far as the European Parliament is concerned, it should simply be transferred to the CAP regulation and removed from the NRPP regulation. This definition should make it possible to identify some of the beneficiaries of the CAP, particularly for area-based aid. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)