As I write this, I’m thinking that if I’m lucky I’ll catch the end of the Scotland-Ireland match at the airport before I get on the plane for Brussels.
If there was any doubt that we’re getting to the business end of the CAP negotiations, Monday’s Council of Ministers will dispel it. The Presidency is hoping to get agreement on ten or a dozen outstanding issues, mainly on the Direct Payments regulation.
One new idea on the table is the so-called Irish tunnel: a proposal by Ireland (of course) that by 2019 or 2020, instead of all the basic payment entitlements having to converge on a single value per hectare, they could converge to an average rate plus or minus some fixed percentage. This seems to be favoured by those who, unlike Scotland, don’t intend to split their territory into payment regions.
Another new proposal, from France this time, is that payments could be higher on the first, say, 50 ha per holding than on the remaining hectares.
Our own Scottish clause has been in the text from the very beginning, thanks to our successful early lobbying. But like anything else, it can in theory be amended before the final deal. So we still have some work to do to ensure the final package delivers exactly what we need.
February 28, 2013 at 6:25 pm
Some years ago the then Polish minister drew attention to the lack of logic for payments being calculated on an historical basis – farmers receiving support not because they had ten cows, but because they had ten cows ten years ago.
More recently, at Oxford Farming conference, Maireed mcGuinness drew attention to the lack of essential justification to flat rate payments. She saidLikewise there is growing attention being paid to the vulnerable livestock sector. Several Member States want to ensure that the sector is not negatively impacted by the proposal to move direct support payments to a flat rate per hectare.
she drew attention to the case for Member States to have the flexibility to structure payments in a way which helps to secure the vulnerable livestock sector while avoiding a return to production linked payments, which as she said would be against WTO rules.
She went on “Fundamental questions have also been asked … about whether it is justifiable to give the same level of payment to each hectare regardless of what farming system is practiced, especially then the labour requirement differs so widely across the sectors.”
It is not clear that the proposal emerging from the Presidency addresses this fundamental deficit in legitimacy.