Scope for member states to couple 20% of payments

There is scope for member states to allocate a maximum of 20% of the CAP budget to coupled income support interventions in the next CAP.

The current proposals also provide leeway to increase this by five percentage points where funding is targeted to protein crops or to farmers producing crops and livestock in areas at risk of abandonment of agricultural production.

The EU’s working document states that coupled income support shall take the form of an annual payment per eligible hectare or per animal or per animal equivalent.

It highlights that support granted as a payment per animal or per animal equivalent shall be limited to the beef and veal, milk and milk products, sheep and goat meat, apiculture products and silkworms sectors.

Adopting coupled payments will require a demonstration of the need for support. According to the working document this is “on the basis of objective and non-discriminatory criteria, address additional income needs related to the difficulties of the targeted sector, product or specific type of farming.

“Member states will not be required to demonstrate the difficulties encountered in relation to protein crop”.

Coupled payments were first introduced in 1992 and quickly rose to prominence as the core element of Common Agricultural Policies for more than the following decade.

They were a method of supporting food production and were a victim of their own success with the EU moving in 2005 to decouple payments or essentially break the link between payments and the level of production at farm level.

Coupled

Voluntary coupled income supports have been allowed since then but they have been highly capped and make up a small share of the EU’s overall allocation of funds.

A small number of countries moved to reintroduce target couple payments in the CAP Strategic Plan with France being the highest profile of these and allocating about 15% of direct payments to coupled support, with their suckler sector benefiting most.