Brussels, 13/06/2003 (Agence Europe) - The negotiations of EU Member States' farming ministers on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that broke off on Thursday evening, will start up again on Tuesday afternoon (16 June) in Luxembourg to try and reach political agreement before the Thessalonika European Council (which starts on Thursday of next week, see yesterday's Europe, p.8). The Greek Presidency and the European Commission will be using this short break to draft a more realistic compromise document, especially for the controversial "decoupling".
At a press conference on Friday Commissioner Franz Fischler said the Commission was prepared to discuss the extent of decoupling but for that it would be necessary to go beyond the old debate between full and partial decoupling to find solutions to the problems that have arisen. The Commission has displayed willingness to give way, implying that the French and German proposals for partial decoupling (60% for cereals and only 40% for adult beef cattle) would not be acceptable. Sources close to Fischler say that the Franco-German proposals would create more problems than they solve. Fischler said the Presidency and the Commission were currently working on criteria for areas where decoupling would be problematic (Fischler stressed that the criteria would be different from the ones defining deprived areas for rural development and other programmes). He acknowledged that in some areas, the link between aid and production would not be scrapped (and therefore these payments would be kept in the WTO's "blue box" of aid that had been reduced). The Commissioner also explained that decoupling would be applied to a greater extent to cereals (where there was less risk of farms being abandoned) than to livestock farming. Acknowledging that the other controversial areas of CAP reform were cutting aid and specific measures for cereal and dairy farming (like butter).
The President of the Agriculture Council, Georgios Drys, said the compromise would take account of the outcome of the various trilateral meetings (Member States, Commission and the Presidency) held on Wednesday and Thursday. He said Member States had wanted to strike agreement soon and that the Council said there must be neither winners nor losers after the meeting.
Fischler was quite upbeat after the marathon farm negotiations, saying he hoped they were on the right road. Past discussions have been tough, he said, and nobody doubts for an instant that they won't remain tough for a while, but all the same we have a unique opportunity next week to conclude reform of the CAP. The Commissioner wondered whether people wanted to give EU farmers clear prospects up until 2013 or whether people would make do with a mid-term review, as it was initially termed? Feeble reform would be criticised by all and sundry and would not be in the interests of EU agriculture, he warned, describing himself as one of the fiercest opponents of people wanting a softly softly approach to CAP reform.
After the ministers' dinner in Luxembourg on Friday, attended by the Commission, Fischler's spokesperson said that everyone agreed on reform and everyone agreed, too, that reform should be valid for the next decade in order to give future prospects to EU agriculture.