Strasbourg, 12/02/2004 (Agence Europe) - In Strasbourg on Wednesday, the European Parliament announced a position unfavourable to the implementation of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of June 2003, criticising the risks of decoupling aid on farmers' revenue and the lack of ambition on the part of the Member States in terms of rural development. This position arises from the adoption (by 313 votes in favour, 60 against and 42 abstentions) of the report by Georges Garot (PES, France), who takes stock of the evolution of agricultural revenue in the EU.
Parliament believes that the lack of any link between aid and the level of agricultural production "could exacerbate territorial problems and cause great imbalance, if a large number of farmers decide to stop producing everything whilst keeping aid". It calls upon the Member States effectively to apply partial decoupling, and to implement the regime transferring premium rights distributionally across national reserves, to help the neediest farms as a priority. The MEPs are in favour of keeping the option to grant payments directly to farmers.
Criticism focuses also on other elements of the reform:
Conditionality of aid: Parliament calls for measures to be taken to make sure that conditionality of aid (aid being subject to the respect of norms) cannot harm the diversity of production systems and the smallest holdings.
Modulation of aid and reinforcement of sustainable development: MEPs believe the type of obligatory modulation adopted by the Council (redeployment to the tune of 1.2 billion EUR, or 3% of market expenditure in 2005) "is insufficient to allow re-balance in favour of the second pillar" of rural development. The EP also stresses that obligatory co-funding "slows down" the evolution of rural development policy, and pronounces itself in favour of a reduction of national contributions in co-funding. In conclusion, the Parliament calls for a reinforcement of second-pillar means beyond resources from modulation, greater integration of rural development into the dynamics of territorial cohesion and the simplification if its implementation.
More generally, the EP feels that market regulation and price stabilisation are a "tool of coherence in the new CAP", based on direct fixed support decoupled from production, and that they are "indispensable" for the stability of income against price fluctuations. In this framework, it feels that institutional prices, guaranteed and limited within certain production volumes depending on the needs of the internal market should act as a safety net within the CAP in the future. It also asked for demand-regulating instruments to be kept in place or extended. It recommends the creation of "crisis-management systems" to be brought in as a last resort when market prices remain below safety-net levels for a sustained period. MEPs note that agricultural incomes rose by 7% in the EU between 1995 and 2002, but state that this increase "was due to a decrease of 15.7% in the number of holdings, an increase in the size of holdings, intensification of production, and a development of multiple activity and diversification". The uneven distribution of aid was pointed out: 20% of holdings receive 73% of direct aid, for 59% of area and only 25% of jobs. The EP also hopes for easier access, improvement and for greater use to be made of existing statistical tools with a view to acquiring better information about income and European agriculture overall.
Court of Auditors recommends review of statistical tools on agricultural income
On Tuesday, the Court of Auditors published a special report which concludes that Community statistical instruments currently fail to provide enough information on the disposable income of farming families. The Commission has been called upon to review the tools at is disposal, in the light of the following comments: -the results of the farm accountancy data network (FADN) are distorted by the major differences between Member States in terms of the choice of farms and the verification of the representative nature of the sample; -the quality of data supplied by Member States for economic accounts for agriculture (EAA) "is highly variable"; -data for the income of the agricultural household sector (IAHS) also lack uniformity, and are often out of date.