MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

EU big farms subsidies to be drastically capped

Fischer is waiting to see what French farmers have to say

European Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel announced plans to reduce funding for Europe's biggest farmers which means anyone currently receiving more than 100,000 euros as part of the Single Payment Scheme would have their aid capped.

The proposals come as part of a "health check" for the 49.8 billion Euros Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which devours 40% of the EC budget. Farmers in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic would be most affected. The commissioner says the Single Payment Scheme which was introduced in 2003 should be simplified. Its original aim was to replace the subsidies linked to the amount of food a farmer produced, a change described as "decoupling". Announcing the proposals, Ms Fischer Boel said the reforms four years ago had modernized the CAP but it was time to move the review forward. "Does the fact that we are conducting a Health Check imply that the patient is sick?" she said. "Certainly not: but it's quite normal for perfectly healthy people to visit their doctor to see whether they need to do anything different to ensure they stay in good shape." The 2003 reforms were brought in when the European Union had only 15 members and the commissioner is keen to make "market support instruments" still relevant now that the EU's membership has expanded to 27. In the past, those supports involved quotas and public intervention. Ms Fischer Boel says it is now time to consider how to create "the right intervention system - one which works as a safety net". Under the proposals, which have been announced at the start of a six-month consultation, the direct payment received by farmers would be capped according to the amount of aid they receive: up to 100,000 Euros – unaffected; 100-200,000 Euros -10% cap; 200-300,000 Euros - 25% cap; above 300,000 Euros - 45% cap. Such a system would naturally target the larger landowners and the commissioner says it would have to differentiate between multiple-owner farms with many workers and single-owner farms with just a few. At the other end of the scale, a minimum level of payments could be set before aid kicks in, although the commissioner says it would not affect "real farmers". The reform plan also suggests raising the minimum area of land needed to qualify for subsidies, now fixed at just 0.3 hectares. "Today we spend more money handling the application than the actual payment itself," Fischer Boel told a news conference. "If you are a real farmer, that's fine. But if you have a goat in your backyard, you are not a real farmer. Let's get rid of some of the pseudo-farmers," she said. Ms Fischer Boel says that the money saved in reduced direct payments should help fund what she considers to be the CAP's new challenges such as tackling climate change and managing water more effectively. In the 1990s, farmers were told to leave 10% of their land fallow in an attempt to curb cereal prices. Now the commission has suggested that the compulsory set-aside rule should be abolished. It accepts that steps would have to be taken to ensure that the current measures taken to preserve the environment are not affected. However French farmers, and government, reactions are still pending. France's powerful farm union FNSEA was fairly sceptical in its initial reaction to the health check paper. "We have another view on what should be done," it said. "The CAP should mainly be an economic policy. To bet everything on rural development is not a solution to allow the European farm sector to take up the challenges it will have to face within the European Union or in the rest of the world".