Brussels (AFP)

EU agriculture ministers agreed on Wednesday on a reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP), marked by more restrictive environmental rules, a decisive step before negotiations with MEPs.

"We have reached a crucial agreement", with a "good balance" responding to "the aspirations of a greener, fairer and simpler CAP", said German Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner (CDU), at the 'after a two-day meeting in Luxembourg.

This is not the opinion of environmental NGOs who consider it clearly insufficient.

The guidelines adopted by the member states will now be the subject of discussions with the European Parliament, which votes this week on its own proposals.

They will have to decide by early 2021 on the rules that will apply from 2023. EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski called the ministers' agreement a "good starting point" for these negotiations.

With an already fixed budget of around 387 billion euros for seven years, the CAP is the EU's biggest budget item.

According to the agreement of the Twenty-Seven, all farmers should be required to meet much stricter environmental standards in order to receive European financial aid.

Small farms would be subject to simplified controls, "which would reduce the administrative burden, while ensuring their contribution to environmental and climate objectives".

- "Learning phase" -

Above all, "eco-regimes", a system of bonuses paid to farmers to support their participation in more demanding environmental programs, would become compulsory: each state will have to devote at least 20% of direct payments from the EU.

The aim is for farms to receive additional funds if they go beyond basic environmental standards.

This point has been the subject of significant friction, with many Eastern European countries fearing to lose European funds if an insufficient number of farmers participate in environmental programs.

To convince them, a two-year "learning phase" is planned.

"We certainly want our farmers to be competitive across the EU and for export, but above all we want a European (environmental) standard which is not based on the lowest common denominator", underlined Julia Klöckner.

Several states, including France, were fighting to impose harmonized standards so as not to create a distortion of competition between countries.

The environmental programs concerned by eco-regimes "include practices such as high-precision agriculture, agro-forestry, organic farming, but States will be free to designate their own instruments according to their needs", specifies the Council. ministers in a press release.

- "Fallow" -

At the same time, MEPs adopted late Tuesday several key amendments to the CAP, the result of a compromise between the three major parties in the European Parliament (EPP, right; Renew, liberals; S&D, social democrats).

This compromise proposes in particular to devote "at least" 30% of direct aid to farmers to eco-schemes, or even to increase the envelope provided for additional support for small-area farms.

The final vote on the CAP in Parliament will take place on Friday.

The agreements reached by agriculture ministers and MEPs have been strongly denounced by NGOs, who consider them incompatible with the commitments made by the EU.

The architecture of the new CAP was drawn up in 2018, ahead of the Green Pact and "From farm to plate" strategies presented by Brussels in spring 2020.

These aim in particular to reduce the use of pesticides by 50% by 2030 while reserving a quarter of the land for organic crops.

"It's a dark day for the environment (...) The transition to ecological agriculture is now fallow," responded Bérénice Dupeux, of the European Environmental Bureau, denouncing the adoption of "contradictory economic objectives "and the too low threshold reserved for eco-diets.

"With this disastrous CAP, we end up with a text from the world before," the Vert MEP Benoît Biteau was indignant recently, accusing the content of eco-regimes of "great vagueness".

The agricultural reform, initially scheduled for 2021, is subject to a two-year transitional phase until January 2023, during which the funds for the new budget are allocated according to the old rules.

© 2020 AFP