Farm ministers were to resume talks on Tuesday (25 June) in a hoped-for push to wrap up a deal on the 2014-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) this week.
Officials set Wednesday as the target for delivering an agreement to the Parliament, which gained powers over the CAP, EU budget and other policy areas under the 2009 Lisbon Treaty reforms.
MEPs have exercised that authority, re-writing parts of the European Commission’s original farming proposal and working through 40 rounds of negotiations with national ministers and the Commission since lawmakers approved, on 13 March, four packages of legislation that make up the next CAP.
“The inclusion of the European Parliament is good for food democracy,” said Samuel Féret, a French environmental campaigner who has been monitoring CAP negotiations since 1996. “It’s not perfect, but it is better than in the past.”
In a Europe where “democratic deficit” is a loaded expression often aimed at the EU Council, the Parliament’s newfound power in shaping the €50-billion annual CAP shows in other ways.
Arm-twisting in Parliament
MEPs have become a chief target of pressure groups fighting for the supremacy of their own interests in the CAP. On 11 March, the agriculture committee’s chairman, Paolo De Castro, lashed out at environmental groups. He blamed their pressure campaigns for halting a legislative manoeuvre that would have allowed the committee to scrap hundreds of amendments before the full plenary vote in Parliament.
“I do not want our committee to be viewed as a committee that does not want the opportunity for a full debate in the plenary,” De Castro (Socialists & Democrats, Italy) said at the time, adding: “We’ve all received letters and e-mails from environmentalists, trade unions” and other pressure groups objecting to the special procedure.
Last week, many of those same environmental groups urged De Castro and the Parliament’s other negotiators to defend CAP environmental mandates that were approved by MEPs but that agriculture ministers have manoeuvred to replace with more flexible measures.
“We would like to remind the decision-makers we were promised a green, fair and local CAP and it looks like we are going to have business as usual,” said Stephanie Roth, a campaigner for Agriculture and Rural Convention, or ARC2020, who was among some 30 demonstrators standing in the rain outside the Kirchberg Conference Centre in Luxembourg, where the CAP talks opened on Monday.
A few steps away, representatives of the Copa-Cogeca farmers and farm cooperative groups were lobbying for a quick deal on the CAP, saying food growers facing climate and economic challenges needed certainty and the support the scheme gives them.
The CAP has always involved political battles - from moves to end wasteful stockpiles of milk and butter in the 1990s to the Commission’s recent push to make farmers more accountable environmentally. Parliament’s new authority adds another layer to the process.
Disagreeing to the end
Seven rounds of discussions last week in Brussels and a ministerial-level meeting on Sunday in Luxembourg still left negotiators with 20 policy disagreements to work out heading into their talks on Monday.
Representatives of the three institutions were grappling with lingering differences that included environmental standards for farmers, a revamped subsidy scheme, and market protections for sugar beet producers.
“As always in a political negotiation, the most difficult things don’t get reached until the end, which is what we’re trying to do today and tomorrow,” said Simon Coveney, the Irish farm minister who is chairing the three-party talks.
He said he was hopeful a compromise CAP would be presented to the European Parliament on Wednesday, four days before Ireland hands over the presidency of the EU Council to Lithuania on 1 July.
Target for 2014 elections
For campaigners looking ahead, the 2014 European elections are seen as an opportunity to hold MEPs accountable for how they voted on agricultural policy.
“It’s very important for citizens of Europe to express what they think about what happens here,” ARC2020’s Roth said of next year’s elections, adding that her organisation had already help mobilise citizen groups to meet with MEPs on the CAP.
Féret, who heads the Groupe Pac 2013, also sees the elections as a chance to influence farm policy.
“We have the possibility next year to campaign for issues beyond the CAP, like food safety and the TTIP,” he said. TTIP refers the EU’s hoped-for trade agreement with the United States, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which environmental groups say could open the European market to American-grown genetically modified foods.
