By unlocking the export potential China offers the pig industry, not to mention the red meat sector as a whole, we could gain entry into a marketplace which comprises a fifth of the world’s population.CLA welcomes plans for a greener CAP
THE Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has welcomed plans to move to a ‘greener’ Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2013.
The CLA said the European Commission was ‘broadly on the right track’ with a leaked paper on the future of the CAP that has emerged in the past 24 hours..
The association said the plans championed the ‘balanced approach’ of Food and Environmental Security the CLA and its EU partner, the European Landowners’ Organisation (ELO), have ‘long advocated’.
CLA president William Worsley said: “The Commission has tried to steer a course between those defending the status quo and those saying the CAP should only be about the environment, and this seems pretty sensible.
“This paper contains many statements we wholeheartedly support, acknowledging the need to retain both pillars and that the CAP has to evolve further to face the food and environmental challenges ahead.
He added: “It stresses the balanced approach the CLA and ELO have been urging, maintaining the EU capacity to produce food, encouraging innovation and productivity, and yet also explaining that it is farmers who can provide more of the environmental public goods we want in Europe.”
He added that there ‘intriguing suggestions’ about how these ideas can be built into Pillar 1 of the CAP, including ‘stronger and more predictable support for the marginal farming areas, for example, the uplands’.
He said, however, that the CLA disagreed with some aspects of the paper, such as the idea of capping payments to larger farms. The suggestion to limit payments to ‘active farmers’ failed to recognise the environmental work that non-farming landowners provide, he added.
Mr Worsley stressed that it was a leaked paper, setting out the Commission Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development’s ideas for the CAP and was ‘not necessarily the final word’.
“We have yet to see what the other Commissioners think of it especially the ones in Budget, Finance, Trade and Environment,” he said.
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Readers' comments (1)
mechanical mike | 8 October 2010 9:15 pm
For gawds sake stop calling it a leaked document... if you dont want it in the public domain then it stays private.All this is,is the EU testing the waters & stirring to see what slurry rises to surface so they can twist it for their own ends yet again
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