Farm Uncertainty Over Reform Plan

CROP farmers will be asked to accept new limits on their ploughing and spraying and dairy farmers will be asked to head into the unknown in proposed amendments to the Common Agricultural Policy which are published today.

They are unlikely to say anything specifically about the particular problems of pig and poultry farmers – who do not get subsidies – or the sheep and cattle farmers of the uplands, who are heavily dependent on historic subsidies which are gradually being withdrawn. But it has implications for everybody.

The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mariann Fischer Boel, publishes her report today on the so-called CAP Health Check – a mid-term rethink of the last major rewrite, which came into force in 2005.

In an article for today’s Yorkshire Post she says soaring food prices have made it impossible to defend restrictions on production, so she wants to phase out milk quotas and abolish the set-aside scheme. Both proposals were expected but there are concerns about the detail.

The gradual abolition of milk quotas within the community, from 2010, as proposed, will add a new element of uncertainty for the sector.

The percentage of land required for “set-aside” has already been reduced to nil, which means farmers decide for themselves how much to leave uncultivated. The proposal is to make that permanent. But set-aside has become a conservationist issue. And to make up for abolishing it – Mrs Fischer Boel reveals – there are “new demands for buffer strips along watercourses”.

At present leaving buffer strips is a choice for which farmers may receive environmental stewardship grants. But if buffers become part of the complicated “cross compliance” required for basic Single Farm Payment, something else will be required to earn stewardship money.

In short, today’s report marks the beginning of months of negotiations. And when they are over, it will be time to talk about what happens after 2012.

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