Ciolos slams new EU budget proposals
EU agriculture and rural development commissioner Dacian Ciolos has blasted the €25bn CAP budget cuts proposed this week by EU Council president Herman Van Rompuy.
Mr Ciolos warned that the latest paper would take the CAP budget back 30 years and that the cuts it proposed would hit those farmers already receiving the least support the hardest.
Leaders of member states will meet next week – 22-23 November – to discuss the EU budget for 2014-2020. Mr Van Rompuy’s paper, put out on Tuesday (13 November), goes well beyond the 12% real-terms reduction the European Commission had proposed.
It also suggests that rather than imposing a mandatory ceiling on the amount of direct support each claimant receives, member states could choose whether or not to implement this part of the reform.
“The Van Rompuy paper goes against our efforts to make CAP fairer, greener and more efficient,” said Mr Ciolos. “It stands to slow the important stimulus for jobs and growth that agriculture is giving to the economy and slows down further investment and the modernisation of the sector.
“It is illogical and hypocritical to call for significant cuts in direct payments, yet at the same time to remove our proposal for a compulsory limit on the direct payments for the richest, most efficient farms. This is not the ‘better spending’ that we in the European Commission have championed in our proposals.”
A DEFRA spokesperson said the UK was opposed to capping and that if this part of the reform was voluntary, the UK would choose not to apply it.
New EU budget ‘must not disadvantage UK’