CAP simplification will get more and more complicated

Last week the European Parliament gave its final nod to a package meant to make the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) rules easier to apply for farmers and national administrations. But it is not the end of the CAP ‘simplification’ debate. It is just the beginning.

The rush of the EU institutions to approve the package has raised criticism from NGOs and left-wing political groups because it targeted the green requirements for farmers, and was delivered without a proper debate.

On Monday, agriculture ministers gather in Luxembourg to discuss for the first time, the annual performance reports on the CAP implementation, in which they will detail the results achieved in 2023.

As a first-year exercise, it “was a rather easy one because we [still] don’t have a lot of results,” a diplomat told Euractiv. But, he added, there are “fears expressed by the member states” that in the coming years “we’ll have to put a lot of data into the report”. 

Simplification, meaning reducing the administrative burden for the CAP subsidies, has been for decades one of the recurrent themes in the debate in the policy.

But this time it is particularly complicated, as it concerns the biggest and most neglected (because – objectively – the least exciting) change of the 2021 CAP reform: the attribution to member states of greater powers in policy implementation.

The fatal hiccups in the new CAP implementation model have their part in responsibility towards the “over-regulation”, “complexity”, and “aberrant standards”, indicated by  Emmanuel Macron in his Sorbonne speech, among the main reasons for discontent from farmers demonstrating recent months. 

The French president, however, failed to mention that member states have unprecedented responsabilities in applying those rules.

The transfer of implementation power from Brussels to the capitals has meant the creation of new administrative structures.

It took time to prepare them, and that’s why the 2021 reform entered into force only in 2023. And it will take time for them to stabilise and work properly with the EU bureaucracy on the one hand, and farmers on the others. 

This is normal for big organisations, such as public administrations. But pressure comes from the fact that, ultimately, public administrations exist because tey must deliver for citizens and taxpayers.

It appears clear that, for many member states, the simplification package is not enough, and others must follow.

On the other hand, the package weakened green requirements, consequently casting doubts about the ability of the simplified rules to deliver the same level of environmental goals.

With this background, ‘simplification’ is set to become an increasingly complicated issue in the coming years, with the political, environmental, social, economic, and administrative dimensions feeding off each other.

Nibbles of the week

EU elections: What’s in it for European farmers? Following a wave of farmers’ protests across the bloc, and with the European Parliament elections in June fast approaching, EU politicians are seizing on the discontent in the agricultural sector for electoral gains. 

See our story on the main pledges made by the Parliament’s political families here. 

A coalition of 15 EU countries led by Germany are set to demand an increase of “de minimis” state aid for the agricultural sector during next Monday’s Agriculture and Fisheries Council (AGRIFISH), diplomatic sources told Euractiv. 

The country representatives will advocate for increasing the “de minimis” ceiling, which currently stands at €20,000 per farm, to €50,000. This is the only type of public national subsidy that does not need approval from the European Commission, since the small-scale envelopes are not considered distorting markets. 

The European Parliament backs temporary trade benefits for Ukraine, paving the way for talks on a long-term deal. After months of painstaking negotiations, on Tuesday (23 April) the plenary gave its final approval to extend the liberalisation of imports from Kyiv until June 2025, including measures to protect EU-sensitive agricultural sectors and the Commission’s pledge to start talks with Ukraine soon to find a permanent solution.

Days after, Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Mykola Solsky was detained for a corruption scandal. Prosecutors announced on Friday (26 April) that Solsky was a formal suspect in a corruption inquiry, accused of illegally seizing land when he was the head of a major farming company and a member of parliament. Earlier this week, he offered his resignation.

Meanwhile, German conservatives push for a national ban on Russian agricultural imports. The conservative CDU/CSU group in the German Bundestag is pushing for a complete ban on all agriculture and food imports from Russia and Belarus as a way of weakening Russia’s war effort.

On Wednesday (24 April), the European Parliament voted to ease seed marketing rules for conservation efforts. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted to free up the exchange of seeds and other types of plant reproductive material (PRM) between farmers and for conservation purposes from new bureaucratic requirements.

On the same day, MEPs backed the creation of an emergency team to combat the entry of pests. MEPs voted in favour of amending the bloc’s Plant Health Regulation and setting up an EU emergency team that will help the EU and neighbouring countries prevent and contain the arrival of crop-damaging pests to the bloc.

In the last plenary of the legislative term, the Parliament closed the procedure on NGTs. MEPs on Thursday (25 April) validated their position on regulating gene-edited plants obtained by new genomic techniques (NGTs). It is customary, but not mandatory, that the next Parliament assumes Thursday’s vote as a starting point, waiting for EU countries to reach a common position and negotiations to begin.

French beet growers urge Paris to authorise pesticide already used in other EU countries. The national beet industry is urging the French government to give the green light on the use of acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide allowed in the EU but banned in the country, to put an end to the distortion in competition among member states.

[Edited by Angelo Di Mambro and Rajnish Singh]

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