The EU's commissioner for agriculture wants to start flattening subsidies being given to the bloc's biggest farms. She has launched a "health check" on common policy in her field, a wide-ranging six-month consultation. Brussels says the review will fine-tune the reforms made in 2003.
It raises ideas, said Mariann Fischer Boel, and looks at shifting priorities: "Modulation doesn't mean that we take money away from agriculture. We just distribute it in a different way. So that we can make the target(s) areas that (are) of huge importance to a certain region or a certain country. I think we have been quiet successful with some of our rural development policies."
Modulation means the highest subsidies would start to be reduced... by ten percent in the one hundred to two hundred thousand euro range, by a quarter in the two to three hundred thousand euro range and anything above by 45 percent.
This is sure to provoke some "Ee-eye, ee-eye, oh" protests in EU member states with a lot of really big farming operations, notably the UK and Germany. But it would allow support to be transferred into the rural development budget.
One of Boel's key questions is: Since market prices today are in such good shape, should community intervention revert to its original purpose as a real safety net - for those who most need it?
Source. Euronews.
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