Brussels, 19/02/2009 (Agence Europe) - In Brussels on Thursday 19 February, the compromise concluded with the EU Council of Ministers on review of the regulation on plant statistics was endorsed by a very large majority at the European Parliament. The text should allow resulting additional constraints on farms to be limited. In line with codecision rules, the first reading agreement approved by the European Parliament must now be formally adopted by Council before it can take effect.
Agricultural data provided by EU member states form an essential tool for the management and assessment of the CAP (common agricultural policy). In April 2008, the European Commission suggested replacing the two regulations on cereal production and plant statistics with a single regulation covering vegetables and permanent crops also.
The compromise found with the Council takes on board a large number of the amendments requested by the EP agriculture committee in the report by Elisabeth Jeggle (EPP-ED, Germany). It mainly concerns those aimed at providing definitions in the body of the text rather than in the annexes, and those aimed at restricting, as far as possible, additional administrative charges and costs for farmers and member states. The Council also agreed to the MEPs' request for future inclusion of data on organic farming.
The data variation coefficient will finally remain at 3% of the cultivated surface areas as the European Commission had suggested, instead of 4% as MEPs would like. To offset this, the possibility of granting greater flexibility to some member states, as requested by the Council, was also withdrawn.
Furthermore, MEPs had requested that any reference to the use of soils should be removed from the text because this is already covered by the new regulation on farm investigations. The compromise finally provides for data collection to be maintained on soils in the context of this regulation but the list of information requested has been shortened (Table 4 Annex II as amended). (L.C./transl.jl)