MEPs at the Agriculture Committee backed the text as proposed by the Council on a two-year reprieve for the EU's "food for the needy" programme. Now the Parliament as a whole has to approve the scheme which will run until the end of 2013, with a budget of up to €500 million per year.

The scheme for distributing free food to the EU's most deprived citizens, the Food for the needy programme, has been endorsed for two more year by the MEPs at the Agriculture Committee in the European Parliament. The Committee backed the text as proposed by the Council so as to avoid delays in getting the aid to those who rely on it. The Commission suggested in October 2011 to add a second legal base to push forward the programme. The programme will run until the end of 2013, with a budget of up to €500 million per year if Parliament as a whole endorses the plan to rescue it.

The Food for the needy programme was set up in 1987 under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It currently provides food aid for 18 million people living in poverty in 20 EU Member States. The free food originally came from CAP intervention stocks, but as these were reduced, the scheme came increasingly to rely on market purchases, just as the global economic crisis caused a sharp increase in the number of citizens in need. However, in April 2011 the EU Court of Justice ruled that the scheme could only use food from intervention stocks. If no action were taken, funding for the scheme would have to be reduced to €133 million in 2012, from €500 million in 2011.

MEPs welcomed the compromise because it will solve the pressing situation of those depending on the programme for now and will leave enough space for further negotiations on how to pursue the programme after 2014.