Direct the blame for the looming prospect of severely reduced Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funding at your national governments rather than blaming Brussels, a senior European Commission official has said.
The Commission’s message was delivered to a gathering of politicians from across the EU gathered by the Oireachtas agriculture committee to Dublin Castle on Monday.
European Commissioner for Agriculture Christophe Hansen’s lead adviser Esther de Lange told the elected representatives that there is currently just one EU member state openly pushing for a larger EU budget.
“I am forced to come back to the budget because many of you have mentioned [it],” de Lange said in response to concerns raised from the floor by politicians relaying messages from farmer constituents from Galway to Greece.
“If I look at this room, there's only one member state whose official government position is that they want the bigger budget.
“All the others want status quo or less and this is, of course, what the Commission has to deal with: the fact that member states are not willing to pay more than they currently do and the fact that we will have to do more than we have done in the past, including on security and a lot of other issues, and that we can only spend a euro once.”
€300bn ringfenced
The Commissioner's right hand woman insisted that the Commission’s budget plan “does do agriculture justice in the sense that no other policy has a ring fencing of €300bn for the next seven-year period”.
She flagged that a number of member states, including her home country of the Netherlands, are “upset” that some of their slice of the EU budget will come with the requirement that it is spent on agriculture.
“So, one of you said that the CAP in the single plan has to compete with all these other policies. No, it doesn't.
“It's the only policy that has €300bn ringfenced funds only for its own measures,” de Lange said, adding that these funds can be topped up with other unmarked EU funds if national governments should wish to prioritise farmers.
Horse trading riles MEPs
The position of EU member states in the budget debate has unsettled the European Parliament’s chief negotiators for the next EU budget.
Parliament wants a budget 10% bigger than what the Commission has proposed, but initial indications from the member states that will pay into the budget is that they want it 2% smaller.
Co-lead negotiator and Romanian MEP Siegfried Muresan slammed the zero-sum approach taken by national governments as “divisive, very political, unpredictable and untransparent” when he spoke to Irish journalists in Strasbourg earlier this month.
Muresan explained that each country sets out to “pay as little as possible and benefit as much as possible”, resulting in a budget of over €1tn being divvied out according to “27 different national interests instead of a common approach”.
The European Parliament is looking for the introduction of three new taxes, the revenues from which would head directly to Brussels for the EU budget, that it says will bring long-term certainty to the EU budget and those who rely on it.
These are a digital levy, a tax on online gambling and a capital gains tax on cryptocurrency trading profits.
Talks to reconcile the three sides around one compromise acceptable to each will not get going until member states agree on an overall spending sum – a task that Ireland will attempt to broker as president of the Council of the EU before the end of this year.
SHARING OPTIONS