Speech Fischler: "Hervormingen van het Gemeenschappelijk Landbouwbeleid - Perspectieven" (en)
Dr. Franz FISCHLER
Member of the European Commission responsible for Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries
"Who does what in the CAP?"
Informal Agriculture Council
Noordwijk, 7 September 2004
The questions raised by the Dutch Presidency come at a particularly appropriate moment.
With the implementation of the 2003 reform and the incorporation of the remaining unreformed sectors into the new CAP, EU agriculture is well prepared to meet the future challenges. It is also clear that the reform will have major implications for what and how we will produce our food and fibre in Europe. It is therefore a welcomed initiative from the Presidency that we today should analyse and discuss what all that means in practice.
But first, it is necessary to see the 2003 CAP reform in its full institutional and international context.
A Long-term Policy Perspective
The new CAP creates a great opportunity for the EU agricultural sector to improve its market orientation and competitiveness. The success of the new orientation of the CAP, which moved away from price and production support to a more comprehensive policy of farm income support through the single farm payment scheme, has heralded a brighter future for the sector. But any improvement will not take place overnight. Regarding food quality issues, many of the infrastructures in our agro-food industry that the Dutch Presidency paper describes still require further investment and development. That is why it has been so important to provide the sector with a stable, long-term policy perspective until 2013.
Forthcoming Reforms
There are also some important sectors, which have not yet entered entirely into the CAP reform process, namely sugar, fruit and vegetables and wine. Given the strong associations of these products with quality and their prominent role in the European agro-food industry, it will be necessary to bear in mind the broader social and financial implications of reform, as well as their specificities during the future reform discussions. However, also in these sectors, the long-term policy and financial perspectives provided by the 2003 CAP reform will assist in orienting the policy down a sustainable path, founded on better market orientation and greater competitiveness.
Rural Development
At the same time, we must address how rural development policy should be adapted in the light of the changes brought by the 2003 Reform and the challenges ahead in the rural regions of Europe. We must respect the growing demands of EU citizens in terms of food and environmental quality; we must take into account the specific interests and difficulties of people living on the countryside; we should think about new ways to better integrate the farmsector and the rural communities into our modern society. It is therefore vital that the EU adopts and implements a rural development policy in tune with the times. The food quality and animal welfare measures added in the 2003 Reform package must be made to work and modulation will obviously play an important role in the attainment of rural development objectives.
The International Scene
While it is clear that the CAP reform has huge implications for our own farming sector, the to-ings and fro-ings in the ongoing Doha round at the WTO have made evident the reality of the world food economy and our place in it. Even before we discuss the implications of the increasingly globalised trade policy, the strength that the CAP reform has given to our negotiating position in the WTO and the gains which we have made (and will make) should not be underestimated or overlooked when we discuss the future of our agro-food industry. With the reform adopted, the EU was able to take a proactive role in Geneva, recognised by all parties in the WTO, which was essential for bringing the General Council of the WTO to a decision on the establishment of Modalities in Agriculture on August 1st this year.
Subjects for Discussion
Consumer confidence
Turning to the points raised by the Presidency, we come to a first question, which all of us have had to face in recent years - consumer confidence in the products our agriculture provides.
Here it is essential to distinguish what the public expects in terms of food safety and what the public wants in terms of food quality.
Food safety should very clearly remain first and foremost the responsibility of the government authorities and we have now a well-established approach in place. The EU is responsible for setting out the overall policy framework and ensuring its uniform application. The Member States are responsible for implementing it given their particular situation.
Food quality, on the other hand, is a much more diverse and many-sided concept. In this domain, the public authorities have limited themselves to drawing up framework legislation of voluntary rather than obligatory application on operators. In this sense, quality standards are much more adapted to what the Presidency document refers to as "private" initiatives. Europe, with all its great diversity in food culture, has already come a long way down this road - not only through the private sector but also through various private-public bodies and interprofessional organisations - which have helped to extend our control of quality standards along the supply chain.
The reputation of our food would suggest that this approach has had a fair degree of success. Therefore, a pragmatic approach, based on the best of what has been done in the past but building in new technologies and savoir-faire should be the one to guide us. It is an approach which European citizens would recognise and would be more likely to accept.
Such an approach also requires appropriate information for consumers. In this context the Commission has taken up the call, raised under the Irish Presidency, for an information strategy concerning CAP reform implementation. In order to implement such a strategy, my services are already working with officials responsible for information policy at the national level in order to identify common priorities and possibilities for cooperation. Based on the ideas emerging from this, the Commission will examine how to achieve real partnership and better complementarities of our efforts.
Effects on third world trade
The Presidency has raised another important question in asking whether developing countries might not be disadvantaged by rising quality standards and the increasing demands made by purchasers.
While it is true that in the Doha Development Round we have had more success than ever before in binding the developing countries into a mutually beneficial, freer trade environment, we cannot avoid the fact that, as world agriculture becomes more competitive, quality standards and product differentiation are more and more a reflection of consumer demand. That is part and parcel of the market-orientated approach and the Presidency is right to raise the question of what its implications are for development policy in general. If we accept that there is a sense in which the customer is always right, and so the demands of purchasers must be met, then we must also accept that assistance to developing countries will need to address this issue.
Subsidiarity
We are all well aware that our administrations are fully involved at present with the setting in place of the 2003 CAP and associated sector reforms. The Commission's aim is based on the respect of the principles of the Council decision through common rules, which respect the specificity of each Member State's agriculture. Nor should we forget that a crucial point of the 2003 CAP reform has been the simplification it will bring. So the Commission is on its guard to ensure that unnecessary complication is avoided in order to attain the more important political goal of a better and more clearly defined set of standards for EU agriculture.
Thus the basic plan for the issues of subsidiarity in decision-making, and the goals of limiting the administrative burden and simplifying the regulatory environment, have been laid out. In terms of on-the-ground implementation, Member State authorities will retain the basic duties assigned to them.
Concluding Remarks
The fact that issues concerning food quality should now have come to the fore should not surprise us. Much of the public debate surrounding the 2003 CAP reform concerned the impact on farming and the countryside. However, given the developments in our society, and in particular its food and food purchasing habits, the impacts of CAP reform on the food industry are equally important. The Presidency paper raises interesting questions as to how agricultural policy and its management should react to the demands of the food industry and consumers. We shall all need to devote our attention to finding the best possible answers.