EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski wants to deploy the extra 7.5 billion euros from the corona mega-recovery fund for the agricultural sector as soon as possible. This amount is included in the multiannual budget agreed by EU government leaders in July, but the European Parliament has not yet agreed to it.
On Monday, the Parliament's Agriculture Committee again argued for more money for agriculture and wants to maintain the current CAP policy (and its related subsidies) for the next two years. The European Commission considers one year of delay sufficient for further CAP discussions and for getting the Green Deal climate policy underway.
Because the extra 7.5 billion euros from the corona recovery fund has been added to the Rural Development Fund, the second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), this amount too is now getting 'stuck' in various dossier meetings between ministers, the European Commission, and the Agriculture Council.
Wojciechowski said the Commission is looking for legal solutions to be able to deploy the money immediately, as farmers need this money as soon as possible. “This is a recovery fund and we need to recover now, not in two or three years.” Germany has already proposed disbursing the money mainly in the first two years.
According to Wojciechowski, the extra CAP money is intended not only for farmers but also for the processing industry. He did not yet clarify what this could concretely entail.
“Many problems in agriculture stem from the fact that the processing industry is separated from agriculture,” Wojciechowski added, and he advocated not keeping the two domains separated in budget expenditures.
An additional problem is that the European Parliament’s Budget Committee has not yet agreed to the full multiannual budget and demands at least 110 billion euros more, which earlier had been cut under pressure from the 'frugal four.' Moreover, a fundamental clash threatens over whether the EU may start raising its own taxes.
Wojciechowski defended the current multiannual budget, as CAP expenditures will now amount to €344 billion in nominal prices — or €386.7 billion adjusted for inflation. This is about 20 billion euros more than what was reserved in July 2018, although still significantly lower than the current CAP budget for 2014-2020.
After weeks of rising tensions between the Commission and the AGRI Committee, Wojciechowski tried for the first time to ease tensions, with the Commission remaining open to new arguments. “Early use of the corona recovery fund could really shed new light on this matter and perhaps make the compromise easier,” he concluded.