European Union ‘should reduce spend on agriculture’

The European Union should reduce its agriculture spending that accounts for 40% of the €129 billion budget and focus instead on forward looking areas such as climate change, energy and job creation, the European Commission’s budget chief has said.

The commission wants to change the way the EU collects funds and what it spends the money on and has just published the results of its consultation with national governments, NGOs, citizens and other groups.

It says the budget system needs a complete overhaul to make it more transparent and allow it to fund policies and respond to emergencies — such as food aid for poor countries and the economic crisis.

Budget Commissioner Dr Dalia Grybauskaite said she agrees with the findings that spending on agriculture and food production should be mainly the responsibility of individual member states with national governments co-financing direct payments to farming.

“It is not up to Brussels to tell each village what they should be growing and I’m sure the Irish people will appreciate this too and would prefer if spending were more efficient and transparent, especially since 80% of the CAP money goes to big businesses, and often not even Irish businesses,” she said.

In Ireland the top 10 recipients of last year’s €1.3 billion in CAP payments were not individual farmers but big businesses. On average most small farmers got less than €5,000 a year, representing just 14% of the total CAP budget.

Research done for the commission also showed that there was no added value in collecting money from member states and redistributing it through the EU.

The distribution also favours richer member states. In overall terms Ireland was the third largest recipient in terms of gross national income of money from the EU budget after Lithuania and Greece and followed by Poland and Hungary.

Dr Grybauskaite said she agreed with the majority of responses that said policies geared towards growth and economic progress should be a priority. These include increasing research and development spending for business, financial support for industry and business innovations and improving competitiveness.