Brussels, 19/12/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 19 December, the EU Council of Ministers adopted without debate the regulation on reform of subsidies to Community banana producers (the United Kingdom, Latvia and Sweden voted against and Cyprus abstained). This does not change the Commission's initial proposal despite the intentions expressed by the European Parliament (EUROPE 9328). Reform will abolish the current compensatory aid scheme and financial support for banana growers. For producers in the outermost regions (Canary Islands, Madeira, Guadeloupe and Martinique), aid will be replaced with a budget transfer of €278.8 million to the POSEI scheme (specifically intended for isolated regions). Aid for continental producers (Cyprus, Greece and continental Portugal) will be included in the Single Payment Scheme (breaking the link between subsidy and production), introduced by reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2003.
In order to tackle the problems encountered by Cyprus, which hoped to be able to conserve some of its aid coupled to production, the Commission undertakes to adjust complementary national direct payments, given the extension (until 2010) of the Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS - a system that is even simpler than the Single Payment Scheme for farms used by 8 of the 10 new EU Member States). In other declarations annexed to the Council minutes, several Member States, namely Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Latvia and Spain, consider the financial allocation for Community producers over-generous. Some of them consider that the margin of guarantee (8.5% - an aid supplement taken into account in the overall allocation) goes against the principle of budgetary neutrality established during the previous phases of CAP reform.
Poland, for its part, trusts that similar attention will be paid to the soft fruit sector, during the upcoming reform of the fresh and processed fruit and vegetable sector. According to Poland, the production of soft fruit is complementary to that of other products (such as bananas) and is no less important for ensuring the sustainability of rural areas in the agricultural community. It recalls that, in the EU25, there are 237,000 ha where soft fruit and cherries are grown, and stresses that the soft fruit sector is particularly exposed to external competition, and that the market analysis shows instruments proposed for the banana market would also allow problems encountered on the soft fruit market to be resolved. Poland considers that decoupled subsidies for this sector of EU agricultural production could be the solution to adopt when reforming the fruit and vegetable sector. (lc)