Luxembourg, 16/11/2007 (Agence Europe) - In a ruling published on 15 November, the Court of First Instance has overturned certain modifications which the Commission had made to the quality criteria applicable to maize, within the framework of the allocation of European funds. The changes were apparently not notified to the farmers in question in time, and nor were they justified by the reasons put forward by the Commission (case T-310/06).
Under the common market organisation for the cereals sector, the intervention bodies appointed by the Member States buy maize harvested in the Community which is offered to them, as long as the offers fulfil certain quality criteria concerning the maximum humidity rate, percentage of broken grains and percentage of heat-damaged kernels. On 18 October 2006, the Commission adopted regulation 1572/2006, which, amongst other things, brought in a new specific weight criterion (which corresponds to the weight/volume ratio, or density) for maize, with a view to taking account of long-term storage problems. In November of the same year, the Republic of Hungary brought a complaint before the Court of First Instance, on the grounds that these new criteria were applicable to the 2006 harvest, which had been planted in the spring, well before the new criteria had been notified.
The Court agreed to the request for an accelerated procedure made by Hungary, and ruled in its favour. It agreed that it was not reasonable on the part of the Commission to impose new criteria to be respected in order to obtain the intervention fund when the harvest in question had already been planted. A farmer may, in good faith, have planted a type of maize which fulfilled the criteria at the time that it was planted, but then found it impossible to benefit from intervention once harvest time came, because the standards had changed in the meantime.
This, according to the Court, is a violation of the legitimate confidence of farmers. Furthermore, the Court rejected the justification for the new criteria brought on by the Commission. Although denser maize is easier to store in the long term, the Court ruled that the Commission had not demonstrated how this constitutes a quality criterion, and the nutritional advantages of denser maize invoked by the Commission are not believed to have been proved. The Court of First Instance therefore cancelled regulation 1572/2006 as regards the specific weight criteria for maize. (C.D.)