The draft budget for 2025 has been prepared under the direction of the current Commissioners, who will soon be partly replaced, after which new plans will be developed.
Last month, figures from Austrian Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn revealed that he wants to save hundreds of millions of euros on the promotional budget for dairy and red meat. A similar proposal was reversed last year in the European Parliament under pressure from the influential Agriculture Committee. A first corrective amendment will be discussed there in two weeks.
The incumbent Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to come forward with proposals 'within the first hundred days' to give the dialogue with European agriculture a fresh start, but so far this has mostly remained words. Hahn's figures show that no 'new money' has yet been included for the Brussels commitments and raised expectations after the recent European farmers' protests.
Outgoing Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski has sharply criticized the idea of linking the entire EU budget from now on to various national political circumstances and reforms. This notion is gaining increasing support in Brussels following the successful 'national linkages' in the disbursement of coronavirus recovery payments.
Wojciechowski dismissed politically based CAP payments as "unacceptable" and pointed to scenarios in which "farmers in Poland would receive no money due to disagreements over the issue with the (...) judiciary" or Italian producers would likewise lose out because of Brussels' concerns about the country's sovereign debt problem.
It is still far from clear who the new EU Commissioners (for Agriculture and for Finance) will be, and what future plans they will prepare. By the end of this month, all 27 EU governments must have nominated their national candidates. It is already known that the conservative ECR Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski from Poland will not be reappointed; the Netherlands has once again nominated Wopke Hoekstra.
Some media have suggested that CDA member Hoekstra could be assigned the Agriculture portfolio in the new Commission, but this is unlikely. Although it is clear that AGRI will go to a center-right Christian Democrat, the Netherlands is pushing in EU circles for a 'heavy' (financial, economic) portfolio, and AGRI is certainly not one of those.
Hoekstra himself often emphasizes his expertise as former Finance Minister. On the other hand, almost all major EU countries demand a heavy portfolio, and Agriculture usually goes to one of the smaller EU countries.
It is already known that a new CAP policy will be developed starting in 2027. It remains unclear whether this will also incorporate possible implications of a potential EU accession by Ukraine.