Brussels, 12/02/2008 (Agence Europe) - At a meeting of the Special Agriculture Committee (SAC) on Monday 11 February, various member states said they wanted to make use Article 69 of the 2003 direct payment regulation, which give countries the option of reserving up to 10% of national funding ceilings to provide extra payments for various important sectors in order to protect the environment or improve the quality and marketing of products.
In discussions on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) healthcheck, several member states (including Spain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Finland) backed the idea of increasing the current level of national ceilings that can be retained to back various farming activities from the current limit of 10%. Initially, the European Commission thought Article 69 would be used to help dairy farmers survive the end of milk quotas in 2015. Some dairy farming countries, however, recommended broader use of the measure. Germany, Portugal and Greece have called for the 10% upper limit to be respected, while several new member states (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania) have expressed interest in making use of Article 69 which, for the moment, does not apply to them. Other member states, like Ireland and Luxembourg, are far more sceptical about the utility of such a measure, and the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark and Bulgaria are hostile to extra payments, raising the danger of an uneven playing field and being challenged at the WTO. A Commission representative explained that Article 69 had not been introduced to sort out all the problems of the various sectors of farming. He warned member states, above all, against the temptation of using Article 69 to reintroduce payments determined by production levels because the EU has to move towards full phasing-out of such aid, breaking the link between subsidies and production volumes.
The SAC also raised the question of the effectiveness of measures to stabilise the market. Predictably, the debate revealed dogmatic gainsaying of 'farm' countries backing the continued use of market management tools by very 'free-market' countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark which argue that by nature, the global market is unstable and such obsolete market regulation tools should therefore be scrapped. Most countries recognise the utility of a safety net, the details of which, however, remain to be hammered out.
Some delegations, like Finland and Luxembourg, raised the question at the SAC of ensuring EU backup stocks in certain farm commodities like wheat, an idea not backed by the British, Danish and Swedish representatives. (L.C.)