CAP deal ‘tainted’ by unequal coupling rules

Irish farm minister Simon Coveney, who chaired the European Union Farm Council meeting that late on Tuesday night produced the broad outline of the next common agricultural policy had warned ministers that they would not get all that they wanted – and so it proved.

Scotland’s rural affairs secretary, Richard Lochhead, while welcoming parts of the package said that failure to introduce a level playing field on coupled payments to help the Scottish livestock sector had “tainted” the deal for the country.

As it stands, Scotland will be entitled to couple – or link – up to 7 per cent of its support payments to help any particular sector, but France and other member states will be able to raise their coupled payments to 12 per cent.

This disparity between member states also irked Nigel Miller, president of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, who said “The coupling option is crucial to Scotland in order to ward off the destabilising effects of the move from the current historic-based single farm payment to the area-based payment.”

Miller admitted the ceiling of 7 per cent agreed by EU agricultural ministers was an improvement on the commission’s original proposals, but he indicated that when the union meets the UK minister Owen Paterson next week, it will be asking if Scotland can use some of the English coupled derogation.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs minister, who represented the UK at the breakthrough talks, conceded that a “one-size-fits-all approach to CAP just doesn’t work. England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales must be allowed the freedom to deliver outcomes tailored to their own circumstances.”

But whether this translates into devolving coupled payments is doubtful, knowing his desire was to get rid of them altogether.

On environmental policies, Paterson did manage to persuade the council meeting that countries who already had schemes delivering environmental benefits should be allowed to keep this autonomy; a position welcomed by English NFU president Peter Kendall.

“We will continue to work closely with the Secretary of State and his Defra team to build a simple scheme which delivers our core objective of ensuring English farmers remain competitive and do not face more costly and demanding greening measures than other farmers within the EU,” stated Kendall.

In general, the English NFU welcomed the overall CAP deal, which was agreed by 25 out of the 27 member states – with Slovakia and Slovenia abstaining – but he was concerned that some of the agreed policies were not “common” and would lead to “internal competitive distortions in marketing”.

Miller also welcomed the flexibility in the greening measures, but retained concerns. “Some significant flexibility has been won on the commission’s original greening proposals that mean many of our original concerns may now have been resolved. The reduction of the ecological focus area to 5 per cent is welcome, as is the agreement to permit equivalent greening measures as an alternative option to the three greening measures, but the impact of the crop diversification rules remain significant for many cereal farms.”

While Lochhead welcomed the increased flexibility negotiated on greening and on other policies such as those on Areas of Natural Constraint, he was concerned over the increasing complexity some of those changes brought with them.

Overall on the deal which the Irish had engineered, Lochhead said that more detail was needed both on how new entrants would be treated and on measures to stop “slipper farmers”.

After giving his summation of the CAP agreement so far, Coveney stressed that a great deal of negotiations would need to take place in the next 12 weeks to hammer out a final deal between the Irish presidency, the EU Parliament and European Commission. A period which the Scottish Government and NFUS see as an opportunity to further modify the plans issued by the Farm Council this week.