Speaking at the European Commission's two-day conference on the future of the CAP post-2013, President of the Committee of the Regions, Mercedes Bresso, highlighted the need for territorial impact assessment for all parts of future CAP. These assessments should not only address rural development issues, but also those related to agricultural production.

The future development of the Common Agricultural Policy must be based on a thorough assessment of its impact on local communities. This was the key message of President Bresso intervention at the European Commission's two-day conference on the future of the CAP post-2013.

According to the Committee's position it is essential to guarantee territorial cohesion, set as one of the political objectives of the EU in the Lisbon Treaty as well as Europe 2020 strategy , and therefore to ensure that all the EU's sectoral policies are coherent and complementary. Before considering corrective or compensatory measures, it should be necessary to anticipate the consequences that the new legislation will have on regions and local communities.

Territorial impact assessments should not be limited to the rural development part of the CAP,  where there is a clear impact on the local area, but also to the part of the policy that deals primarily with agricultural production. The impact of farming on local communities is significant, and any proposals to change the way in which the CAP affects this sector of the economy should take this impact into account. President Bresso also recalled CoR's position that there is a need for greater harmonisation between the CAP and cohesion policy in order to maximise their effectiveness.

President Bresso said that the beneficial impact of the CAP on local communities could be substantially improved by adopting a multi-level governance approach. "Regions and rural communities can no longer be mere co-financers of programmes, they must be actively involved in the development, implementation and management of those programmes too. A successful overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy requires across-the-board involvement of the regional or local level."

Highlighting some of the key elements of the CoR's recent own-initiative opinion on the future of the CAP, President Bresso said that the CAP of the future would have to ensure equal treatment of the different types of production and regions by offering a more flexible range of support mechanisms, as well as making that support more conditional, linked, for example, to best practice in the protection of the environment and natural resources, or to the level of employment on each farm.