Following the announcement yesterday of the European Commission’s proposals for Common Agriculture Policy reform post-2013, the Commission looks set to close a legal loophole which has enabled landowners to receive millions of pounds in subsidy payments for doing virtually nothing. image expired

A key feature of Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos’ proposals was the emphasis on making CAP “more straightforward and fairer”; Ciolos proposed gradual reductions on payments of over 150,000€ annually, up to a maximum payment of 300,000€. In additions to the, the Commission proposed to take action to stop individuals, so-called slipper farmers, profiting from taxpayer support intended for farmers from 2014.

In recent years, especially since the global economic crisis heightened general awareness of such issues, some aspects of the CAP, such as wealthy landowners who have been allowed to profit from large subsidies by buying up entitlements, even though some of them are not actively involved in farming, have been the source of much scandal.

In Scotland in particular this has been a problem, with Scottish farmers and politicians stating that such practices ‘dilute’ the rest of the country’s allocation. Both Rural Affairs Secretary Richard Lochhead and NFU Scotland President Nigel Miller welcomed Ciolos’ decision to support only active farmers and curtail the 1.5 million hectares of “unfarmed” land under forestry and other uses in Scotland, a move they said will avoid diluting the overall payment under the commission’s CAP reforms.

Scottish MEP George Lyon also welcomed this aspect of the reform, though overall he expressed disappointment at the EC’s package of measures. Mr Lyon yesterday said of Mr Ciolos’ proposals, "There are plus points, as he has taken action to stamp out the slipper brigade, help young farmers and target more support at producers in LFA [less favoured] areas who really need it."

Tennant farmers call for workable ‘active farmer test’

The Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) this week reiterated its calls on the European Commission to ensure any means of establishing whether a farmer is ‘active’ or not is workable. On Monday TFA chief executive George Dunn questioned the Commission’s definition of an active farmer and said its previous proposals for such a test would be impractical.

Mr Dunn said, “It is important to ensure the support available to assist farmers in meeting both production and environmental goals is actually going to the right people. A workable active farmer test will achieve that.”

Leaked documents, which detailed many of the Commission’s proposals last month, in advance of their publication, showed that the Commission defined an active farmer as someone who derives more than five per cent of their income from farm-related activity. Mr Dunn disagreed; “This is not a workable definition. There will be many individuals and companies who will be actively farming but for whom farming represents just a small part of what they do.”

The TFA and NFU have also said that, at an administrative level, the Commission’s plans for establishing who is an ‘active’ farmer will create huge problems for the Rural Payments Agency and its equivalents in other Member States, who will be forced to sift through vast amounts of financial information to determine applicants’ eligibility.

The TFA warned that many potential applicants would be reluctant to provide the level of detail needed and instead recommended the Commission adopt a self-assessed test. The test would be based on the situation ‘on the ground’ and would establish those individuals who had land available to them for farming purposes and who were taking the entrepreneurial risk in relation to the activities taking place on the land.