The Agriculture & Fisheries Council will meet in Luxembourg on Monday 23 (starting at 2 p.m.) and Tuesday 24 June (starting 9.30 a.m.), under the Presidency of Mr Iztok Jarc, Slovenian Minister for Agriculture, Forestry and Food. Commissioners Mariann Fischer Boel, Androulla Vassiliou and Joe Borg will represent the Commission at the meeting.

Agriculture and food safety points will be treated on Monday. On Tuesday the Council will deal with the Fisheries points. The Slovenian presidency will host an informal working lunch to discuss the forthcoming revision of the EU's aquaculture strategy.

The points on the agenda are:

• Agriculture - Health Check http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/healthcheck/index_en.htm by which, the European Commission proposed to further modernise, simplify and streamline the Common Agricultural Policy and remove remaining restrictions on farmers to help them respond to growing demand for food. The so-called CAP Health Check will further break the link between direct payments and production and thus allow farmers to follow market signals to the greatest possible extent.
• Food Safety.
• Fisheries - Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Council will discuss with a view to reaching political agreement on the Commission's proposal for a Council regulation establishing a Community system to prevent, deter and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
• Fishing authorisations.
• Destructive fishing methods.
• Policy statement.
• Fisheries Partnership Agreement with Mauritania.
• Celtic cod.
• Bluefin tuna. On 13 June the European Commission announced that it was closing the bluefin tuna fishery in the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic for the purse seine fleets, as it deemed that the quotas allocated to them would shortly have been exhausted.
• Fuel crisis. Council will discuss the emergency package of measures to support the fisheries sector during the current economic crisis which has been agreed by the Commission last week. The purpose of these measures is to tackle the immediate social and economic hardship triggered by the dramatic rise in the price of oil while also addressing the underlying structural problems of the European fleet.

The Commission will present the elements of this package in the form of an informal information note. On the basis of the guidance given by Council, the Commission then plans to adopt a formal proposal on this subject early in July.