Single payment headache for EU legal eagles
European Union officials, and civil servants from the 15 member states, have been meeting since the Council of Agricultural Ministers agreed to radically reform the CAP.
They are preparing legal texts to back up the reform a complicated, slow and tedious task; the draft regulation on the single farm payment alone has some 156 articles. Other texts cover rural development, cereals, rice, dried fodder. Drafting the two texts for milk one for levies, the other for the common organisation of the market is almost finalised. Dry fodder, cereals and rural development texts are completed, work continues on the single payment text. After Agriculture Ministers approve the texts, the Commission will draw up detailed rules.
Member states can fully decouple or partially decouple direct payments from production. Agriculture and Food Minister Joe Walsh is not expected to make any decision on these options, until the legal texts are in place later this year.
CAP reform information meetings organised by the Department of Agriculture and Food, in association with Teagasc, commenced in Blarney, Co Cork, last week and will continue countrywide to October 8, including meetings twice daily at the National Ploughing Championships next week.
In Blarney, Minister Joe Walsh said many farmers had expressed a preference to him for full decoupling, given its simplicity and its capacity to eliminate bureaucracy and red tape.
He said the earliest the new arrangements can be implemented is January 2005, with an option to wait to 2007.
"The major challenge now facing us is to manage the transition from the old to the new regime so as to ensure a smooth transfer and enable Irish farmers and our food sector to exploit the new opportunities to the full," he said. Individuals have submitted 150 submissions on the CAP reform to the Department; 20 more came from farming and other interest groups.
