The European Commission's responses to the climate change challenge and agricultural market instability are inadequate, whereas new support models for farmers have yet to be defined, said MEPs and experts at a hearing on the CAP "health check" held by the EP Agriculture Committee on Monday.

How to respond to new CAP challenges?

Climate change, the problems of water resources and the loss of biodiversity pose new challenges to the CAP. The majority of participants in the hearing felt that the solution proposed by the European Commission, namely progressively increasing levies on direct aids to farmers so as to provide funding for Member States' own rural development policy programmes, was inadequate.
 
Allan Buckwell (Country Land & Business Association, United Kingdom), observed that the climate change challenge is not new and that the Commission proposal neither specifies what measures are to be taken on farms nor imposes any obligation on Member States. Furthermore, the environmental cost of rising demand, which works against efforts to reduce intensive farming is entirely ignored, he stressed. "The real new challenge is to maintain Europe's contribution to world food security by producing with less impact on the environment,"

What model for the decoupling system?

Decoupling subsidies to farmers from specific crops was a key component of the 2003 CAP reform. Some Member States chose to fix payments per hectare by region, whilst others calculated them on the basis of support previously received by farmers during a reference period. The Commission would like progressively to replace these historic reference periods with a new, more uniform, per-hectare model which would be easier to justify, but objections have been raised, not least because the geography of some regions' administrative limits do not reflect agricultural reality.

Jesús González Regidor, of Madrid University, proposed a "territorial flat rate per new entitlement", i.e. a new payment entitlement that would vary depending on the agricultural and rural area where the farmland is located, which he said, would enhance the EU's territorial cohesion and hence the CAP's social legitimacy.