Parliament brings CAP reform closer to Commission proposal

MEPs vote for clearer greening measures.

MEP collapses after CAP vote

The European Parliament voted in Strasbourg yesterday (13 March) to adopt a position on reforming the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that is closer to the proposal put forward by the European Commission than to the terms agreed by the member states.

Speaking after the vote, Dacian Ciolos, the European commissioner for agriculture, said that the Parliament had “moved closer to the position of the Commission than the Council”. He said the Commission’s hopes that MEPs would fight for a more positive reform of the CAP had been met.

Member states have steadily watered down Commission proposals to tie direct payments in the CAP to environmentally friendly farming techniques and to end old quota regimes. Those tendencies were largely backed by the Parliament’s agriculture committee in January.

However, the plenary rejected a proposal for member states to be allowed to use “equivalent measures” to meet the greening requirements, returning instead to the Commission’s proposal, which outlines specific measures that need to be met. The plenary also voted to reject the possibility for ‘double funding’ through both the CAP’s first and second pillars, which had been allowed in the committee position.

Agriculture committee chairman Paolo De Castro, an Italian centre-left MEP, denied after the vote that it constituted a rejection of the committee’s position. “The vote in plenary confirms basically what was agreed in the agriculture committee,” he said.

Green groups welcomed MEPs’ departure from the committee position, but lamented that the reform would still not be as green as they wanted. “The best that can be said about today’s outcome is that it is not a step backwards,” said Faustine Defossez of the European Environmental Bureau, a green campaign group. “This was an important day for the future of agriculture and for democracy, but sadly the opportunity for a major shift to sustainable farming has been missed. Few will celebrate the scraps that the Parliament passed.”

Copa-Cogeca, a European farmers’ organisation, welcomed the vote, saying it was a “good basis to work on”. Speaking after the vote in Strasbourg, Gerd Sonnleitner, president of Copa, said it would like to see an agreement concluded quickly. “I urge EU farm ministers next week to agree their position on the new CAP so that negotiations can commence between MEPs, EU farm ministers, and the Commission to reach a final agreement by June,” he said. Ciolos said he thought an agreement by June was feasible.

Even if an agreement is reached by then, the new rules will not be fully implemented until the beginning of 2015. For this reason, the Commission will in the coming months propose a temporary regime for 2014, when the current CAP rules expire, Ciolos said.

Extended quotas

Many MEPs reacted angrily to the extension of some quotas. The Parliament voted to extend sugar quotas until 2020 rather than 2015, when they are set to expire. They also voted to allow tobacco farmers to receive subsidies, and for farm producer organisations to extend their rules to bind non-members. This upset Liberal MEPs and members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

“The last reform began to gear [the CAP] towards the modern age, but many MEPs seem to want to go back to unjustifiable subsidies and food mountains,” said James Nicholson, a British member of the ECR group. “If today’s vote by MEPs were enacted, it would not be a reform of the CAP but a regression back to the excesses of the 1980s.”

Ciolos also criticised the decision to extend sugar quotas. But he said: “We can take into account some complementary measures, like we did for milk” to ease any problems arising from a 2015 expiration date. He said extending the quota could hurt the competitiveness of the European sugar industry.

Negotiations with member states will begin on 11 April and end on 30 June, said De Castro, who will be leading negotiations for the Parliament.

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