About: direct payments Archives

Romania has made significant progress in the past decade thanks to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds and it opposes potential cuts in the post-2020 farming budget, Agriculture Minister Petre Daea told EURACTIV Romania in an interview.

The Common Agricultural Policy has done a good job of ensuring farm income and food security but it is incoherent, inefficient and outdated, and must be radically overhauled to ensure good value for money in the future, an independent report has found.

Phil Hogan, the EU's Agriculture Commissioner, announced that the next CAP will be “more ambitious” in terms of its environmental objectives, by ensuring farmers are on board in greening agriculture through broader use of precision farming techniques.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is a highly divisive subject. Not only are the basic elements of its design controversial but policymakers cannot agree on how to calculate the impact of individual measures on the environment. EURACTIV Germany reports.

The European Commission has agreed to relax its rules on CAP payments in ten countries, after harsh climatic conditions in the first half of the year damaged or destroyed many crops.

Faced with a looming gap in the EU's post-2020 budget caused by Brexit and higher security spending, the Commission is considering cutting funding for farmers, conditioning disbursements on the rule of law in member states and removing rebates once the UK leaves.

The EU Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM EU) yesterday (19 January) sent a letter to EU Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner Phil Hogan, calling for a “fundamentally new approach” to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The EU Common Agricultural Policy after 2020 should mobilise both direct payments and rural development pillars, in order to pave the way for the introduction of much-needed digital technologies in the farming sector, experts in precision agriculture told EURACTIV.com.

The EU and its member states will spend over €191 billion by 2020 to help the bloc’s farming sector go green.

Britain's withdrawal from the European Union should start now, in order to prevent additional market uncertainty, the pan-European farmers' association, Copa-Cogeca, told EURACTIV.com on Monday (27 June).

The EU’s freshly agreed agriculture policy reform caps direct payments to the largest farms, but a senior parliamentarian says that flexibility in its enforcement potentially weakens social and green commitments.

The European Parliament’s agriculture committee has voted to weaken key environmental proposals made by the European Commission while agreeing to reduce subsidies to big farms. These and other proposals will be considered by the full Parliament in March.

High commodity prices have made European farmers much less dependent on farm subsidies, offering debt-laden countries a unique opportunity to reform the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a new report published yesterday (5 October) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has concluded.

The French President Jacques Chirac and the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said they needed more time to resolve their dispute over the EU's agricultural policy reform. They set themselves the deadline until the EU's Copenhagen European Council in December to find a compromise on changing the funding of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The Dutch State Secretary for European Affairs Atzo Nicolaï has warned that EU enlargement could fail if Member States do not agree to phase out direct payments to farmers.

Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler has called for a quick agreement on EU farm aid to the candidate countries. At the informal meeting of ministers for agriculture from the Member States and candidate countries in Denmark, the Commissioner warned that enlargement would be blocked without this agreement.

The European Parliament's Agriculture Committee
has backed the Commission's proposal to gradually introduce
farm subsidies to the future EU Member States over a period of
10 years.

The US President George Bush has signed a
controversial new farm bill that will boost agriculture
spending by 70 percent over the next 10 years and increase
subsidies to US farmers.

EU policy makers and farmers organisations have
expressed concerns that the new US Farm Bill will endanger WTO
trade liberalisation talks on agriculture.

The Spanish Presidency of the EU, the
Commission, Denmark and some other Member States agreed at an
informal Agriculture Council in Murcia that rural development
will be fundamental to the future of the Common Agricultural
Policy (CAP).

The EU farm ministers are meeting informally in Murcia (Spain) from 27 to 30 April to discuss the Presidency's policy paper on rural development. Rural development is seen as the second pillar of the Common Agriculture Policy.

The Commission submitted draft negotiating
positions on agriculture to the Council on 15 April. The
positions are based on the Commission's strategy for these
negotiations, adopted at the end of January
2002.

EU Agriculture Commissioner, Franz Fischler,
underlined the benefits of the Commission's proposal for the
enlargement negotiations on agriculture in an address to the
Farm Ministers of the 13 candidate countries.

A study, released by the Commission on 18 March,
concludes that farmers in the candidate countries will be
significantly better off even without direct
aid.