Farmers await mid-term CAP review of payments with bated breath

FARMERS across Europe are anxiously waiting for the mid-term review of the CAP, due to be published tomorrow, which they suspect will have huge implications for incomes in the years ahead.

When Agenda 2000 was signed off, it allowed for a review at the halfway point, but most thought that the terms, subject to a bit of tweaking here and there would run to the end of 2006 as intended at the time. With enlargement of the EU beckoning, the commission is moving in advance to lower the amount of income going directly to farmers. And the key proposal as previously reported is to decouple payments from cattle, sheep or crops based on historic earnings. This will be a single payment based on historic receipts from all CAP sources.

One of the big unknowns in all of this is what terms or criteria will be to define the historic basis for the new form of payments.