Decision time for EU funds
It could return to haunt us, as the time comes to agree the budget for 2013-20.
For many across Europe, bailouts and austerity have left the EU dream in tatters.
Despite their heavy dependence on EU funding, farmers escaped relatively lightly.
But that could change hugely, now that it’s decision time on Common Agricultural Policy funding up to 2020.
After two years of dithering over big financial decisions, it’s no surprise that the EU seems fearful of commitment to its huge trillion-euro budget for day-to-day activities over the next seven years.
Already, there isn’t agreement on €8bn worth of unpaid 2012 bills — including cash for rural development. So this week’s talks on the €1,000bn multi-annual budget will test the leaders of the 27 member states to the limits.
In short, this is a fateful week for farmers — dwarfing what may come in the months and months to follow of CAP reform negotiations, or in our national budget next month.
In the depths of bailouts and austerity over the past year, many people may have felt we would have been better off outside of the EU. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that farmers will have similar thoughts in the coming weeks.
They will, if Sweden gets its way, which is “a clear model for reducing agriculture subsidies”.
Even the EU institutions are taking the knife to the EU’s major sectoral policy, the CAP, in the form of European Council President Herman Von Rompuy’s idea that agriculture should share in slashing €100bn from EU spending for the next seven years — a deeper cut than proposed by the European Commission or the current Cypriot EU presidency.
Von Rompuy’s job was created by the Lisbon Treaty, which expanded EU foreign policy, and aimed to speed up EU decision-making and give member states one EU voice — moving a little nearer to a United States of Europe
Far from the ideals of the Lisbon Treaty, his proposal weakens the point of a European Union, if it withdraws funding from the largest manufacturing industry in Europe — food — and from the EU’s second biggest sectoral policy, the cohesion measures to help the weakest member states.
Von Rompuy’s proposal could be a negotiating ploy to bring pro-austerity leaders, like the UK, to the negotiating table and to soften-up those who feel that greater EU spending is needed at a time of crisis. But it is hard to see how the CAP can escape without major surgery — although powerhouses like France and Italy are rejecting any decrease in the CAP, which is the EU budget’s biggest item.
But farmers have strong opposition in Brussels — such as from the group of Nobel laureates who delivered a petition signed by dozens of them urging Van Rompuy, and other EU officials, not to strip funds for research and innovation.
Van Rompuy wants a further 6% cut in farm expenditure, on top of Commission proposals, which already cut the CAP budget significantly in real terms.
His plan for budget agreement could see as much as 23% cut off EU rural development spending — which includes expenditure in Ireland on disadvantaged areas and forestry.
Van Rompuy’s cuts could knock the stuffing out of EU farmers already hit by this year’s bad weather in many countries.
The CAP is the source of about 85% of net budget transfers from the EU to Ireland.
And every euro taken off it, in this weekend of long knives in Brussels, will weaken our agri-food sector.
