CAP 2014 The battle begins

" 2014 definitely set as base year "2011 key to activate payment " 30% Greening payment = €81/ha " Option for suckler and sheep payment " High value entitlements slashed further

Brussels lukewarm on Ciolos proposals

EU Commissioner for Agriculture Dacian Ciolos received a lukewarm reaction from both the European Parliament (EP) and farm organisations for his CAP reform proposals.

The Commissioner spoke of wanting to build a new partnership with farmers; ''a contract of trust and openness''.

However, he was criticised for either going too far with flattening of payments, or not far enough, depending on the current level of payment of the member state concerned.

While the document ran to over 400 pages, almost all the measures had been well leaked, and MEPs were ready to react. The greening measure attracted most criticism. Setting aside 7% of land was described as a retrograde step, the need for three crops on tillage farms a ''straitjacket'', while environmental groups said the measures fell short of what was necessary.

For his part, the Commissioner spoke of the need to bridge the gap between economic and environmental sustainability.

When questioned by the Irish Farmers Journal on how the proposals would see payments from the more productive land and farmers shifted to land with low output potential, Commissioner Ciolos replied that this would not necessarily be the case due to regionalisation.

''Payments will be in a homogenous area, which member states will define,'' he said. The logic here is that regionalisation could segregate farms with similar economic, or agronomic, profiles. This would, in theory, reduce the flattening element of payments, as high payment farms would be grouped together and averaged.

However, there is little belief in Ireland that a workable model can be found for regionalisation. All modelling done so far has failed to identify a solution, such is our complex soil structure, within the same farm (sometimes the same field!) containing a wide variety of soil types and quality.

On the subject of 2014 being chosen as a reference year, the Commissioner told the Irish Farmers Journal that it was decided ''to take the reference year at the start of the period (the new CAP will run for) to reflect the reality on the ground''. He said ''certain safeguards'' had been built in to reduce the effect an upcoming reference period would have.

One measure was the inclusion of the necessity of a farmer to have at least one entitlement activated in 2011 to be eligible for receipt of entitlement in 2014.

A Commission spokesman said that the intention of the measure was to activate vast areas of land that had completely missed out on direct payments under the current scheme. In Ireland, 500,000ha are without entitlements.

Another change to the text saw the amount of money that could be shifted from Pillar I to Pillar II doubled from 5% to 10%. This is an option that no Irish Government is likely to take up.

Ciolos also revealed that the Commission had decided on Wednesday morning to end beet quotas in 2015, one year ahead of previous plans.

If this proposal is accepted, Ireland could be processing beet in five years' time. The new CAP should be decided and in place two years before that, but judging by the level of opposition to the proposals, and the wide breadth of issues that are contentious, a lot of work remains to make that happen.