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Paris, April 13, 2017
Open Letter to Stéphane LE FOLL
click here to download the letter
The European budget can adapt to agricultural crisis situations
In an interview in the April 6 issue of La France Agricole, French Minister of Agriculture, Agrifood and Forestry Stéphane Le Foll declared “We could implement counter-cyclical mechanisms that lead to additional subsidies when prices are low” and “when they are high, subsidies decline”.
This issue is at the heart of the work of the think tank Momagri, which was established by agricultural leaders convinced of the need to make CAP subsidies more economically fair and efficient. Yet, Stéphane Le Foll added “The problem is that we do not have any European budget for that, and that we cannot initiate budget variations according to price levels”.
An analysis of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and the 2014 Financial Regulation shows that changing annual budgets that would result from the introduction of counter-cyclical subsidies would not imply a derogation to current budget procedures.
Including counter-cyclical aids in the 2020 CAP is a political decision that cannot take refuge behind a technical excuse.
The CAP––the EU’s sole integrated policy––is no longer competitive compared to the other major agricultural policies in the United States, Brazil and China among others, and plants the seeds for a rejection of the European design.
This is why, it is urgent to give back a much better economic effectiveness to the CAP with counter-cyclical subsidies in order to address the farmers’ central problem, namely the volatility of agricultural prices.
Press contact:
Dominique Lasserre
[email protected]
Twitter @Momagri_Paris
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