EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan has suggested that EU farmers will have their direct payments cut after the UK - a net contributor to the bloc - leaves the European Union.

Without the UK’s annual contribution of £2.5 billion to the EU’s farming pot, the EU may have to rationalise subsidy payments, Mr Hogan told German magazine Der Spiegel.

The EU is already gearing up for fresh reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) just two years after parts of the 2013 reforms were implemented. Farming officials in Europe fear that the UK’s withdrawal will leave a significant gap in the EU’s CAP budget, which already accounts for over two thirds of the entire EU budget.

Tensions over the potential shortfall are likely to come to a head in negotiations on the UK’s departure, which could begin within the coming months, after PM Theresa May was handed Parliamentary assent for her plan to trigger Article 50 and begin Brexit negotiations on Thursday.

Speaking to the European Parliament about the future of the CAP on Wednesday, Commissioner Hogan said recent lessons from crises in certain horticulture and dairy markets (which saw significant spending from the EU’s emergency funds) should spur on moves towards “A policy that is quite rightly more market-orientated” which would lead to less “dependence on public intervention in the market… but should also be more targeted and effective.”

He said he believes a future CAP should ask “Farmers to raise their level of environmental ambition and reward them for that contribution” and admitted that the 2013 reforms resulted in overly-complex legislation, which “Left all parties involved unsatisfied with the final result”. He suggested this means there is a need for further simplification of the next CAP.

Though the Commissioner didn’t mention Brexit as a contributing factor by name, he did allude to “Rapid changes in the broader policy environment surrounding EU agriculture” as another contributing factor to a new reform process.