Brussels, 08/05/2002 (Agence Europe) - At the last meeting of the Special Agriculture Committee (SAC) in Brussels on Monday afternoon, Member States' representatives made progress on various technical aspects of the proposal to regulate the agricultural ethyl alcohol proposal, while the politically sensitive issue of state aid will be examined by ministers at the June Agriculture Council. The European Parliament is expected to adopt its opinion on the proposal on 27 May.
In the light of the discussions at the SAC and while waiting for the EP opinion, the Spanish Presidency has drawn up a compromise document annexing two Council declarations on the following aspects of the proposal - distillates (products created during the spirit distillation process): some Member States (including France, Austria, the Netherlands and Greece) have always called for distillates to be covered by the regulation and for them to be considered as agricultural products. Doubts have been expressed about this by countries like Germany, over the legal value of incorporating a recital for distillates to be covered by the regulation and the Spanish Presidency has proposed replacing the recital with an identical Council declaration; market management - as a compromise between the French position (supported by other countries) of wanting a new management committee to be set up to deal specifically with ethyl alcohol, and the Commission's view that the wine management committee should be responsible (the Commission opposes the setting up of a new bureaucratic structure), the Presidency has suggested inviting ethyl alcohol experts onto the wine management committee.
Other technical issues that now seem to have been settled are the inclusion of synthetic (industrial) alcohol in the scope of the directive alongside agricultural alcohol but only to allow data for the sector to be collected and analysed (an important request from the EP and European agricultural alcohol producers) and changing the title of the regulation to scrap the words "common organisation of the market" opposed by countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and the UK as a matter of principle (see EUROPE of 12/13 March, p.14).