Progress made on CAP reform deal

As is so often the case, these things go down to the wire, but it looks as if real progress is being made at last on a CAP reform deal. European Union farm ministers reached a revised negotiating position as the clock struck midnight on Tuesday, raising hopes that a new common agricultural policy will be agreed on Wednesday as talks moved to Brussels, reports Reuters.

'We now have a clear updated mandate ... There's lots of momentum here,' said Irish farm minister and Council chair Simon Coveney following two days of negotiations in Luxembourg.

However, Coveney admitted 'There are some difficult issues to resolve. I am not predicting it is going to be easy. It is not.' Issues that still need to be resolved include the deadline for abolishing EU sugar production quotas, which are blamed for pushing up domestic prices and limiting European sugar exports.

A key sticking point in talks could also be who makes the key decisions on issues such as market intervention, with the European Parliament wanting an increased role, something which ministers have been reluctant to accept. Coveney said no member state voted against the revised mandate, but Britain and Germany abstained on the European Parliament issue. Co-decision has already made it more difficult to achieve agreement.

CAP reform process hits new snags

Despite the relatively optimistic mood at the recent 'informal' Farm Council in Dublin, the CAP reform process has hit new snags which suggest that a deal may not be reached under the Irish presidency.It appears that a resolution to the EU’s CAP reform process could be delayed further beyond the end-of-June target date, after the European Parliament threatened to veto any deal over member states’ refusal to budge on certain issues, reports Agra Europe.

Parliament agriculture committee chair Paolo De Castro this week slammed the European Council for its approach to the recent ‘trilogue’ discussions on the issue, claiming their approach goes against the "spirit" of the Lisbon Treaty, which granted MEPs equal say on farm policy under the ‘Ordinary Legislative Procedure’. MEPs want to reach a deal by the end of June – when the Irish Presidency ends and the Lithuanian Presidency begins – but this will not happen unless all subjects are up for negotiation and the Parliament's views are heard, De Castro stressed in an impassioned speech this week.

De Castro is just the latest agriculture official to express his public frustration at the drawn out negotiations on CAP reform and perhaps calls into question the suitability of the co-decision procedure in reaching an agreement on this policy, something which has concerned me for some time.

Enhanced co-decision making has been defended as injecting greater legitimacy into the EU institutions, as directly elected MEPs should in theory increase the democratic input of European citizens, and thereby lead to improved legislation. But then according to one recent poll, over 50 per cent of British voters do not know they elect members of the European Parliament. In any case the process appears to have been the victim of growing euroscepticism across the bloc, as well as the austerity agendas of certain member states.

The CAP reform process appears to have hit a brick wall and unless there is a dramatic breakthrough at the ‘trilogue’ talks in the next couple of weeks, the Luxembourg Farm Council on June 24/25 – when it was hoped a CAP reform agreement would finally be signed, sealed and delivered – could turn into a damp squib. Some member states have said they may not even bother to turn up.

Is the complexity deliberate?

For all the talk of a drive towards simplification, complexity is a built in feature of the Common Agricultural Policy. It makes it more difficult for critics to assess what the real effects of decisions are. It becomes more challenging to mount a sustained and informed critique.

Bringing agriculture into the co-decision mechanism at the European Parliament was unavoidable given that it was a supposed boost to democracy, but an alternative narrative would be that it gave more opportunities for special interests to defend the status quo.

MEPs have tabled no less than 7,415 amendments to the proposed 2014 reform of the CAP before departing for their long summer recess. It will take until September just to translate them.

With 2,292 amendments on direct payments to farmers alone, changes are proposed to almost every part of the Commission's proposals. There are those who wonder whether the sheer volume of amendments is a deliberate strategy on the part of some member states to defend the status quo. France, Germany and Italy come to mind.

It is going to be difficult to complete the reform process on time. Moreover, what was a less than radical reform in the first place is going to be watered down even further.

What impact will co-decision have on CAP reform?

In an interetsing paper presented at the Agricultural Economics Society conference at Warwick University last week, Alan Greer and Tom Hind explored the possible impact of the introduction of the co-decision on CAP decision-making and reform prospects. They proceeded by setting out four scenarios:

Scenario 1 The 'conventional' view (often put forward in the media) in which the EP gains power at the expense of other institutions (assuming that there are significant points of difference).

There are two limiting factors on the ability of the EP to exercise power. First, as the lead committee ComAGRI has had very limited experience of co-decision and it has to develop positions that can command majority support across the Parliament. If its views are too close to those of the agricultural community (and the committee is more agriculturally focused than in the past), it could be challenged in the plenary, especially on environmental issues. Second, the Parliament has limited resources relative to the other institutions: the total staff of ComAGRI is around 15, plus three seconded researchers.

Scenario 2 The Council-EP axis in which the Council of Agriculture Ministers will use its expertise to work in close partnership with the EP to shape the legislation proposed by the Commission, weakening the latter. This depends on member states being able to work closely with national MEPs and the presenters argued (rightly in my view) that this scenario was not likely to develop in the next few years.

Scenario 3 The Commission-centric scenario in which the EP's resource void is filled by the Commission. The Commission would use its expertise and resources to work with the EP, using ithe role of arbitrator to facilitate agreement between the EP against the Council in order to shape the final outcome more closely to its preferences. The paper authors thought that this was the most likely scenario. The Commission had increased its displacement as a result of enlargement.

Scenario 4 'Co-indecision'. Co-decision might actually make decision-making more difficult. An average co-decision dossier takes 36 months to process. Some participants in the audience thought that this was the most likely scenario.

If that is the case, it does not bode well for reform. But any of the scenarios is likely to make the reform process more complex, slower and less radical.