CAP reformers cannot agree on what a farmer does

Talks on the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform held on March 26 broke down over questions like “what does a farmer do” and payment for performance.

The CAP accounts for about €60 billion in the EU budget, so these decisions are of some importance.

The so-called ‘super trilogue talks’ held with Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, Portuguese Agriculture Minister Maria do Céu Antunes, representing the Council, and the Commission’s Executive Vice-President Frans Timmermans did not reach agreement on the main issues for the reform proposals.

The definition of an ‘active farmer,’ meaning how to describe what one does, has balked the debate, although the group claimed to have made progress.

“Today’s super trilogue was a much needed push in the CAP reform negotiations.  With regard to the ‘active farmer,’ we achieved a better understanding of each other’s positions and we are now one step closer to an agreement,” said the press release published after the trilogue meeting.

Essentially, the definition of the ‘active farmer’ involves deciding what a working farmer does. The issue is that the CAP has always been paid out based on land holdings, but the fact is that much of that land was not being actively farmed.

The Commission seeks to change that, and to develop a system that rewards best practice farming. But, to do this, agreement must be made on what makes a good-performing active farmer, and this has proven elusive.

The EU Commission states that an “active” farmer is one who undertakes an “agricultural activity” which is defined as one of the following:

• Producing, rearing, growing agricultural produce, including harvesting, milking, breeding animals and keeping animals for farming purposes;
• Keeping land so it is suitable for grazing or cultivation without extra preparatory work;
• Doing the minimum required on land that is naturally kept suitable for grazing or cultivation.

This would seem straightforward, but the devil is, as so often, in the details and Member States have been debating them for several years.

Still another fraught question is that of the CAP’s new delivery model. Here an agreement is far off, although Wojciechowski claimed that decisive steps have been taken during the super trilogue.

The Commission’s proposal for the new delivery model aims at shifting the CAP to make payments correlated with performance. This is based on nine objectives that need to be pursued by member states together with a set of common output and result indicators.

The EU Parliament, however, finds the whole system to create too much paperwork, all of which will fall to the Member State to administer.

The Commission has spent several years elaborating this reform scheme for the CAP and does not want to change it. .

The trilogue did agree on the result indicators and on a two-year review proposed by the Portuguese Presidency of the Commission to meet the requests of MEPs for more flexibility. Farmer performance must be monitored annually, but the MEPs want it to be formally reviewed only every two years.

The chair of the European Parliament’s agriculture committee, German MEP Norbert Lins, said on Friday that although significant progress had been made, there was still a lot of work ahead, with more effort and flexibility needed.

“After the good atmosphere in the super trilogue, I’m optimistic that we can finalise the CAP reform negotiations by the end of this quarter,” do Céu Antunes told the press. But the Council will have to show more flexibility in coming weeks to allow us to proceed quickly,” he said in a statement.