Brussels, 21/11/2006 (Agence Europe) - Agriculture ministers of the EU Member States should, at their meeting from 19 to 21 December, be able to reach agreement on the revision of the aid scheme for Community banana producers. At the Agriculture Council in Brussels on Monday 20 November, producer countries supported the proposal, while other countries felt the aid envelope for the banana sector to be too generous and costly.
During the debate, the main Community banana producing countries, Spain, France, Portugal and Cyprus, backed the European Commission proposal to put an end to the current compensatory aid system and replace it with aid more adapted to the particular circumstances of each of the regions of production and more in line with the aims of the revised Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (see EUROPE 9269). Spanish minister Elena Espinosa highlighted the importance of banana production to the Canary Isles (10,000 plantations and 15,000 directly connected jobs). She also welcomed the fact that the proposal took full account of WTO rules. Curiously, Greece, also a producer country, did not express an opinion on the text. Its position is known, however: it believes that the aid planned (€1.1 million per year) does not reflect its real banana production. It is calling, therefore, for a change in the reference period chosen to calculate the level of premiums, from 2000-2002 as in the proposal to 2003-2005. The proposal grants €280 million per year for all producer countries. While supporting the proposal, Cyprus feels it is necessary to retain part of the aid linked to level of production, while the Commission would prefer it to apply a single payment to the plantation (decoupled aid). A group of non-producer countries, some being major importers of “dollar” bananas (bananas from Latin America), including the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Latvia, were unhappy with the level of the envelope proposed, which they felt was too generous. These countries' criticism was directed in particular at the reference period chosen to calculate aid (2000-2002), which they felt favoured banana producers too much, and also the budgetary safety margin (a “bonus” of 8.5%) offered by the Commission to producer Member States, the effect of which is to increase the envelope from €258 million to €280 million.
Mariann Fischer Boel felt that, over all the producer outermost regions (Canary Isles, Guadeloupe and Martinique and Madeira), the banana sector provided income for 15,000 plantations and 24,000 people. “The Commission proposal confirms EU solidarity with the outermost regions,” she said. For bananas growers in the outermost regions, the Commission plans to transfer a financial envelope of €278.8 million per year to POSEI programmes specially designed to aid these regions. In producer regions, which are not outermost regions - mainland Portugal, Greece and Cyprus - aid to the banana sector will form part of the single payment scheme which applies in various other sectors. (lc)