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.

The fake strategy: European scientific co-operation

When the European Union member states agree on conclusions "concerning a European partnership for international scientific and technological cooperation", the result sounds as stupid as this:

The Council of the European Union (=the member states) "INVITES Member States, incorporating as appropriate the countries associated to the FP7, to encourage a dialogue at European level with a view to the coordination of their international S&T cooperation policies and activities, as well as to facilitate consultation between interested stakeholders, including industry, in order to identify opportunities for and, where appropriate, obstacles to the development of scientific and technological cooperation activities between the European Union and the rest of the world"

In other words, the member states invite themselves not to start but just to encourage a dialogue. They just facilitate consultations, they don't encourage them, and they do it just in order to identify, not to address opportunities in global scientific co-operation.


Dear Council of the European Union, dear member states,

I am aware of the problems to find a common position, but please just don't publish this kind of declarations or conclusions, because they are empty, they are worthless, and they are unreadable. If you cannot agree on joint ambitions, then just don't talk about them, let us not spend time on diplomatic nonsense which does not help anyone and costs nothing but valuable time.

Yours sincerely,

Julien