Parliament vote on CAP reform: safe future for farming

The European Parliament gave its strong support today for European farming by accepting the reform package on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The EPP Group regards the vote as a success for farmers and consumers alike, but recalls that long negotiations are still ahead.

The EPP Group Rapporteur for the direct payments section of the CAP, Mairead McGuinness MEP, has warned that a long road lies ahead in terms of achieving a final CAP agreement: "In all Member States, we need to openly debate how best to use the direct support payments, how to target them, including the possibility of coupled payments for sensitive sectors, especially livestock production. The debate should focus on how to secure the future for all farmers alike."

"A fairer, greener CAP must deliver food and public goods for EU citizens. Change must be gradual and proportionate, this is what the EPP Group has worked to secure."

Giovanni La Via, Rapporteur on the financing, management and monitoring the CAP Report, underlined: "Financing and managing the 2014-2020 CAP means ensuring adequate resources but also making the interventions provided effective."

"We also need to make the structures responsible for checks in agriculture more efficient and the procedures on penalties more transparent to help farmers to be involved in a new agricultural system. This new agricultural system has to be attentive to production, environmental and market challenges but it also has to be simplified in order to reduce the excessive bureaucracy burden."

Elisabeth Köstinger MEP, EPP Group Shadow Rapporteur on the Programmes for Rural Development, welcomed today's outcome: "The Programmes for Rural Development will promote more than ever local and regional cooperation between agriculture and other sectors, like projects for regional product flow or direct marketing of regional products."

"We also want to intensify investments in innovations. New instruments in the second pillar will be a voluntary risk management and income stabilisation tool for farms, and new crop, animal and plant insurance systems."

 More balanced producer-retailer relationships must be developed through the empowerment of farmers, according to EPP Group Rapporteur for the Common Markets Organisation Regulation, Michel Dantin MEP:

"The idea that farmers should band together must not translate into cartels, but it should allow them to break free of economic dependence and to guarantee a decent standard of living for the farming population. Establishing strong producer organisations for all sectors with much greater freedom of action than originally proposed by the Commission is an appropriate way to achieve this aim."