The future of CAP: Ciolos interviewed

The EU Commissioner responsible agriculture, Ciolos, has been intervied by a Romanian radio station.

It's a fairly long interview (48 minutes in audio) so I'd just point to one paragraph on the future of subventions under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union:

"După 2013, intenţia mea este ca nu numai Pilonul doi, programul de dezvoltare rurală, să susţină micile ferme, ci chiar şi subvenţiile să se acorde şi pentru ferme mici care realizează produse care se comercializează direct pe piaţă. Sper să găsesc modalitatea, instrumentele prin care astfel de pieţe locale, pieţe tradiţionale, pieţe ţărăneşti să fie susţinute financiar."

This pledge for for the support of farmers who produce for local markets seems to be quite important for Ciolos, since he underlines this right from the beginning of the interview.

The interview is also worth reading for its "Eastern" perspective on the CAP and the problems faced by smaller farmers in Romania and beyond.

And the moderator does a good job in playing the devil's advocate, pushing Ciolos to give answers also on other subjects like gene manipulated products (Ciolos: Everyone is free to decide.) or the relations between the EU and national or local levels (Ciolos: If European funds are misused, it is first of all the responsibility of national authorities to take measures instead of centralising complaints at the Commission.)

So take a look at the interview; I've just checked and the Google translation seems to be quite understandable.

(via Ciolos on Facebook)

CAP consultations & accessible data

I've noted before that the consultations for the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are under way.

On the website of the European Commission, you can are already find 564 contributions (7 May 2010) to these consultations, although they are running for another month.

However, as usual, the data is not easily accessible and so I have extracted the data and put them into a public table with name, organisation, country of the contributor and link to the individual contribution (no guarantee for correctness!).

If you have a Google account, you can export the data as a CSV-file, e.g. to build a map with contributions from individual countries. With an account, you can also comment on the data, e.g. if you know that certain contributors receive farmsubsidy money.

It should be the task of the institutions to make this kind of stuff accessible themselves, but well, until they learn, we will have to do it...

Fish & Fields: EU reforms for the better?

CAP and CFP are the EU abbreviations of the week, but they will remain extremely important for the months to come.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of the European Union need reform, and with the informal meeting of EU ministers responsible for fisheries (see also: Euronews) and the data harvest of CAP subsidies for all member states - except Great Britain - there were two notable events on Monday and Tuesday that made the euroblogosphere talk about CAP and CFP.

Both reforms have already begun with public consultations but their outcomes are uncertain.

The fisheries policy consultations are already finalised, with over 300 reactions from the public and interested stakeholders as well as a statement by the EESC, the European Economic and Social Committee (a consultative body of the EU). In the light of these discussions, the European Movement in the UK also sees an urgent need to reform the fisheries policy and not to let the CFP slip back into the hands of the member states. (Update:) And the Commission seems to agree.

In the same business, but on the fields instead of on the sea, the EU Commission is inviting the public to participate in the CAP reform consultation. This is more necessary than ever seeing that the subsidies spent through the EU's agricultural policy are largely misdirected. Without a reform of the CAP, the whole "Europe 2020" reform will not be possible as Valentin notes, not least because most of the EU's budget is wasted for large-scale agriculture, to the disadvantage of the future of the EU and to the disadvantage of farmers all over the world, instead of investing it in future technologies and the brains of EU citizens.

And so, while the National Farmers' Union has reportedly issued its vision on the future of agriculture in the EU and while Commissioner Ciolos is already participating in different consultation meetings - e.g. in the EESC - it remains absolutely vital that people like the guys from Farmsubsidy.org keep track and follow the subsidy money to give a real basis for the debate - e.g. that the number of "CAP millionaires" continues to rise - both for us bloggers but also for the mainstream media.

Most eyes may be on Greece these days, but we should also keep our ears open and listen to the proposals for the fisheries and agriculture reforms because they will be as important for the future of the Union as the stability of the financial markets.

Picture: © marcs-album / CC BY-NC 2.0

Commission consultation: EU agriculture post 2013

Do you know how the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU should look after 2013?

If yes, just follow the invitation* of the European Commission, join the debate, and read what others have answered on the questions posed by the Commission.

If you need some more facts on how the billions of euros (almost 50% of the EU budget) for the CAP are wasted invested, why not reading Jack Thurston's "Does the CAP fit?" on FollowTheMoney.eu or why not going to Farmsubsidy.org to search how CAP money is spent in your country (see sidebar) or your city (search field)?**

But apart from that:

Does anybody believe in the possibility that the CAP is ever reformable? I suppose that not even Commissioner Cioloş is... Or are you, Sir?

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*Via Wyn Grant
** Thanks at Jack for a great presentation on farmsubsidy.org at the re:publica 10 conference!

Picture: @amypalko / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Why Poland agreed to the milk quota regulation in November 2009

You still remember the milk quota dispute we saw in October/ November between the EU member states?

In the summary of EU Council acts of November 2009 (published Monday) I found the following statement by Poland on the Council Regulation (EC) No 1140/2009 that deals with milk quotas and that was adopted by all EU countries (with the UK abstaining) in November:

"Poland decided to withdraw its objection to the proposed document for the sake of all Member States and because of the fact that its adoption is a condition required to launch an emergency package to the amount of EUR 280 billion.

However, it must be stressed that Poland continues to doubt the legitimacy of the proposed new rules for calculating the levy payable after exceeding the national milk quota in the case of Member States applying the milk quota buy-back mechanism. The submitted proposal will lead to a decrease of the milk quota exempt from national aid in those Member States which fully use the production limits granted and, at the same time, administer the national quota buy-back mechanism.

The new rules will openly discriminate against the most active farmers who contribute to the development of market milk production.

In view of the above, Poland finds it essential to maintain the milk quota buy-back mechanism as a facultative activity which should be implemented only after an independent decision of a Member State."

I am not sure that this figured in the news at the time, but it is a proof of the pressure on member states to follow an emerging consensus in the Council, especially under time pressure, that I found worth publishing.

My Twitter coverage of the Ciolos hearing

I have covered the first 90 minutes of the hearing of the designated Commissioner for Agriculture, Dacian Cioloş on Twitter.

My tweets can be found here. EurActive France was tweeting, too.

My impressions:

• Cioloş remained overly general for the whole time, both on goals and on current policies, and he didn't seemed to be briefed on technical details or was ignoring them. He gave slight hints that he is not against GMO in agriculture.

• As a person, he isn't very impressive and I have doubts that he can stand against the agriculture lobby (Update: as I would hope) or defend the EU in WTO negotations (Update: as the lobby might hope).

• But he understands and speaks English and French, although he preferred to speak Romanian most of the time. When attacked, he switched to Romanian.

Not sure he's a good choice.

Update: Update in the text thanks to this remark on Twitter.

UPDATE: Leaked: The Commission's EU budget review

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UPDADTE 12 Nov. 2009: It looks like this story has been burried because the Commission has no guts to stand against the interest of farmers!

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After the recent leak of the Presidency proposal for the Stockholm Programme, FollowTheMoney.eu has now published a leaked draft EU budget review (PDF) by the Commission.

The first and most notable quote is that "the Commission considers that a root and branch reform of the budget is needed". In other words, the EU budget as it stands is completely outdated and needs an extreme reform to stand the demands and necessities of these days.

Then, the document focuses on five priorities the new budget design should focus on:

• generation of European added value
• concentration on key priorities
• greater flexibility and responsiveness
• simplification and efficiency of delivery
• fairness and added value in the financing of the budget

I won't go into details of these five different points, especially because they are the same as always when somebody proposes to review a budget.

In fact, the whole document is fairly general, and so let me focus on some conclusions and points that are more concrete and that I find important enough to highlight:

• cohesion funding needs to be made according to clear conditionality and it also needs to be performance-oriented (p. 12)

• funding shall become more competitive and focus on cross-border activities (p. 13)

• the climate and energy change budget should be adapted to the goals set, inter alia by making the cohesion and agriculture spending "climate proof" (p.15)

• "considerably more funds" for transport infrastructure are needed (p. 16)

• a "significant reduction" in agricultural spending (p. 17) and a possible co-financing of direct aids by member states (p. 19) are foreseen

• the neighbourhood policy funding shall be reinforced (p. 20)

• the EU needs closer co-operation regarding migration and a Migration Management Support Fund should be established (p. 23)

• on page 24 there are a number of interesting measures to increase flexibility in the budget

• lighter procedures for smaller funds shall be applied (p. 25)

• integration of national programmes and EU spending (p. 26) and more national co-funding (p. 27)

• develop new financing resources for the EU that make it profit from its own successes (p. 29, 2nd para)

So this document is not about the size of the budget, but it is well about the principles that the EU budget programming should follow. Nevertheless, it is clear that the many addition budget issues mentioned will need a clear reduction in the CAP budget - something that is clear to everyone but the agriculture lobby (kindest regards to the milk farmers who waste our taxes and throw away our milk to pressure on our governments).

Altogether, I think the draft text of the document is quite ambitious in many regards but remains quite vague in many other instances too.

It also mixes policy-related points with an obvious political dimension and administrative issues that almost look self-evident. I am not sure whether this is very helpful because if you have seen diplomatic negotiations around such documents, the debates will concentrate on the policy issues and the most obvious administrative issues that could be tackled immediately are left aside and disappear in the jungle of diplomatic speeches and addenda.

And the CAP reduction will be a tough fight, and the Commission has all my support to fight hard!!

But I am not sure whether the Commission will be able to get this thing through (and we haven't even seen the final version of this document yet) and so by now all it is is nice talk that hasn't gone through the hands of the member states who will talk it down as they always do...

CAP and Commissioner Fischer Boel's metaphor

Earlier today I was complaining on Twitter that the Commission blogs were almost quiet this October, but now EU Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel published a post that is way beyond expectations.

In the post, she is heavily criticising the recent dairy farmer decision by the EU Council, and she uses a marvellously undiplomatic metaphor to do this:

So to put it a bit bluntly, we are currently using one hand to shoot ourselves in the foot by unnecessarily increasing production costs whilst the other hand is trying to stop the bleeding with cool cash.

As I pointed out at a recent conference at the European Policy Centre, it sometimes seems as if I were part of a television comedy, except for the fact that there is absolutely nothing to laugh about.

Thank you, Ms Fischer Boel, especially since you are right in criticising the ministers for not taking decisions on GMOs while wasting money on milk production that is way to high over demand or way below efficiency if the prices are this low - below production costs - as they are now.

This is blogging worth publishing, and other Commissioners could use the example to actually blog instead of producing kind-of-press-releases.

The story of Farmsubsidy.org

Getting things out of the Brussels bubble, co-operating to make the EU more transparent, informing citizens and a wider public - all this is discussed here on this blog and elsewhere, while others - like farmsubsidy.org - are actually doing something.

The farmsubsidy.org initiative has now produced a 20 minutes video titled "Fields of Gold" to talk about how this incredible project-network has evolved, how they work, and what they have achieved.

If you have these 20 minutes (you should have them!), take your time to watch the film, because it tells a lot about how we could change the political system of the EU if we were able to get more things like this one done:

Fields of Gold: Lifting the Veil on Europe's Farm Subsidies from farmsubsidy.org on Vimeo.

And if you don't have the time to watch the video, go to their website, go to fishsubsidy.org or follow a whole lot more on FollowTheMoney.eu which brings together the joint efforts of the many to make the EU budget more transparent.

Thanks for that!!

Genetically manipulated organisms in the EU: Subsidiarity and banning

On the side of the member states, there seems to be growing opposition against the Commissions openness towards the use genetically manipulated organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.

In a note directed to all member states, Austria, so far supported by

• Bulgaria
• Cyprus
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Greece
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• Slovenia

and referring to an earlier declaration made by the Netherlands, demands the clearly defined legal right for each member state to ban GMOs:

"The legally soundest solution we envisage is a set of minor amendments to relevant EU legislation, which should introduce the right of an individual Member State to restrict or prohibit indefinitely the cultivation of authorised GMOs on its territory. The amendments could be based on the subsidiarity principle (Article 5 TEC) and the principle of unanimity for decisions on land use (Article 175 TEC). Such an “opt-out” clause could be formulated in quite straightforward legal terms and could easily be integrated into the existing legislation.

In general, I don't have anything against this approach but I also don't have anything against GMO in agriculture.

I just don't understand why we have a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that takes the biggest share in the EU budget and then we should decide not to have a CAP in a certain field...?!

If the member states want their right to subsidiarity in agricultural policy they should scrap the CAP (in fact, they should do it anyway)!

Germany, France, and Austria demand interventions in the milk market

In a joint note, Germany, France, and Austria have demanded interventions into the milk market due to low milk prices.

The request was directed to the 2944th AGRICULTURE and FISHERIES Council meeting on Monday, and there was supported by Lithuania, Slovakia, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Poland, Hungary, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugual, Ireland, Spain, Latvia and Romania.

They all demanded higher aid for cheese, for skimmed milk powder and for ...school milk consumption.

This looks very much like a populist reaction to the latest milk farmer protests, and I deplore that the member states react on such short sighted pressure, especially in the field of agricultural policy that already gets way to much funds.

According to the Council summary, only the Commission, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom raised doubts and asked for a more "cautious approach".

Welcome back, European Agricultural Union!

A citizens' summary by the European Commission: "EU policy paper - simpler farm policy"

Maybe I just haven't found something like this before, but for me it just felt like the citizen-friendly future has arrived at the European Commission.

I was reading a recent blog post by EU Commissioner Boel (responsible for agriculture and rural development) in which she is describing the Commission's work to reduce administrative burdens under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP):

"I am confident that we can meet our target of reducing the administrative burden arising from the CAP by 25 percent by 2012. But we are not resting on our laurels. There are many more projects in the pipelines. One of these is an IT system that can improve the information flow between Brussels and the Member States. You may wonder what that has to do with simplification. The answer is simple: we firmly believe that better IT systems could reduce the administrative burden on farms by more than €400 million."

Since in the same post Ms Boel promised that the respective report would be easy to read, I went to see it (PDF document).

But more important than the report is the citizens' summary. It starts already with the title: Instead of

COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

A simplified CAP for Europe - a success for all

the citizens' summary just titles

EU policy paper – simpler farm policy

And in this summary, everything important is summarised in a limited number of clear sentences without standard EU vocabulary. Fully understandable for every citizens who can read.

And everyone interested in more details can still read the full communication, which - I have to admit - is also very readable and keeps things as simple as possible.

That is exactly the way I want to see EU administration to act: Keep it clear and simple. This is a good day for the EU Commission.

PS.: And because of this nice presentation of the report, I don't even feel obliged to look through all details hoping to find something evil hidden between the lines.

Back to butter mountains: 30,000 tons of butter will be bought by EU taxpayers

Sad news have been spread by the International Harald Tribune:

Faced with a drastic drop in the price of dairy goods, the European Union is to buy 30,000 tons of unsold butter at the taxpayers' expense - reviving one of the abiding symbols of Europe's generous farm subsidy system.

NOOOOOOO!!!!!

Scrap the CAP

Although not a big fan of Mr. Hannan, it's worth throwing a glance at his one-minute speech on the uselessness of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Excellent.

Environmental Council discusses CAP health check [supplemented]

On today's and tomorrow's agenda of the EU Council of Environmental questions, there is one issue concerning the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union.

Under the title "CAP Health Check" - an initiative launched by the Commission in late 2007 (and which seems to have been discussed by many, including Martin at the EESC as well as a broader coalition outside the institutions) - the French EU Council Presidency has issued a document in which it describes further steps to be taken to reform the CAP. Under the initative, several new regulations will be developed, inter alia paving

"the way for increased consideration of environmental aspects in the CAP, in particular with respect to two points:

– the increase in the financial resources of the rural development policy to provide a better
response to the "new challenges" identified by the Commission;
– the inclusion of water management in the cross-compliance criteria for support under the first pillar."

The initiative includes also changes in payment schemes, favouring regional development, but since I am not an expert in CAP policies, I excuse for not trying to explain any details.

It seems as if some of the issues of the CAP reform have already advanced considerably, because in the Presidency document it is laid down that the next Agriculture and Fisheries Council (17-19 November 2008) is expected to bring an agreement between the member states on these issues.

The European Parliament is also expected to vote on the CAP health check on 19 November, the last day of the EU Council meeting. Some media report that the initial proposal by the Commission has been considerably watered down by the EP's agricultural committee.

However, when you read the document, it does not look like a full and comprehensive CAP reform that would be needed in order to change the course of the European Union considerably is on its way.

Everything laid out in the document rather look like adjustments, some technical and some political, but without much vision.

5th August 2008: EU documents

You are interested in wine?

Well, then you might enjoy the lecture of the 50 pages (+annex)

Proposal for a Council Regulation amending Regulation (EC) No 1234/2007 establishing a common organisation of agricultural markets and on specific provisions for certain agricultural products ("single CMO Regulation") (PDF)

that deals exclusively with the amendment of the respective Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) regulation that has been introduced to simplify [sic!] the CAP.