The NFU has launched its policy document on the CAP post-2013.
Speaking in Brussels today, NFU President Peter Kendall described how the CAP must continue to steer farmers towards the market while providing support to help them deal with the shocks posed by volatility. He said: “Agriculture is central to many of the challenges faced by the EU from improving the security of energy supply to tackling climate change but above all, we need a policy to ensure that consumers in the EU and beyond had a secure and sustainable supply of food produced to high standards.
"As farmers, we’d all like to get to a place where we can be much less reliant on CAP support but to achieve this requires a number of conditions to be met. Until then a strong CAP remains essential. We want a policy that does what it says on the tin - that is focussed on farmers and farming activity, that is common in its funding and mechanisms and that is a policy determined at EU level. However, we believe that the CAP must evolve after 2013
The NFU believes the CAP should focus on:
- maintaining our productive capacity here in Europe
- providing a buffer against the threat posed to farmers by volatile markets
- supporting efforts by farmers to become more competitive
- providing incentives to improve environmental performance
Mr Kendall added: “Above all, however, the key challenge for the next reform is to start to address the functioning of the market, to make it fairer and more balanced so that farmers stand a much better chance of making profitable returns. Until then, direct support payments to farmers will remain a crucial component of the policy, helping farmers to deal with market shocks as well as supporting them in meeting the higher standards of production that are expected of European farmers. We do accept, however, that historical references cannot be justified after 2013.
“But we also need to see flanking measures. Rural development programmes should be playing an important part in the process of structural adjustment. But they have lost their way, becoming a dumping ground for a range of policy objectives and tied up in bureaucracy. The Second Pillar of the CAP needs to be simplified, made more coherent. Above all, it's funding has to change to a more sustainable and fair basis for all EU farmers. This means modulation has to go.
“The CAP faces massive political and financial pressure. There is no hiding from this. But our biggest fear is not so much the pressure on the budget as a whole but the threat of a renationalised policy through ever more flexibility to member states or worse, more co-financing of support. This would be a disaster for European agriculture and totally negate the many positives that the CAP has brought to EU farmers and society.”
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