Alan Matthews, Trinity College’s Professor Emeritus of European Agricultural Policy, has sounded a cautionary tone around expectations that the CAP budget will grow much beyond the €296bn announced last week.

“I don’t think people understand just how big the proposed increase in the overall Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF) is,” he said.

When the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery instrument is stripped out of the current MFF, the real change proposed is much larger.

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“The NGEU is a one-off budgetary measure to help Europe’s economy recover from Covid-19, drawn from borrowed money,” Matthews explained.

“Removing it from the equation, the proposed budget for 2028-2034 is a 25% increase on the current budget (1.26% of gross national income as opposed to 1.01%).”

Matthews expects that this budget increase will be very difficult to sell to member states. Thus, the pressure is likely to be downwards, which could result in line cuts to all proposed budget programmes, including CAP: “I would be pessimistic that the CAP will gain funding, the political challenge may be to retain what was announced last week in the context of a smaller final budget.”

Matthews observed that a couple of programmes currently funded within Pillar II of CAP are compulsory elements that must be funded from within the €569bn cohesion funding that is outside the €296bn ringfenced for CAP.

“The Leader EIP is one, AEGIS (Agriculture, Environment, Governance, Innovation, and Sustainability) is another. Outside of that, I don’t see much beyond a token amount.”