On Monday members of the European Parliament Agriculture Committee criticised the Commission’s proposals for post-2013 Common Agricultural Policy, which would see heavy cuts being made.

Parliament adopted a resolution on 23 June calling for the long-term agriculture budget to be maintained at least at 2013 levels, "Parliament has sent a very clear signal that we do not want to see resources being taken away from the CAP", which "needs to respond to the interests of 10 million farmers but also of all the citizens of Europe," said Agriculture Committee Chair Paolo de Castro.

Commissioner Dacian Cioloş stressed that the commission had allocated ‘new money’ to agriculture under different headings, including €2.8 billion from the Globalisation Adjustment Fund available to farmers and €5.1 billion of 100 per cent EU-funded research and innovation programmes was “clearly intended for the agriculture sector”.

Nevertheless, MEPs said Europe’s farmers have an increasing number of tasks to juggle, and cuts to the CAP would be disastrous. Albert Dess said "We simply cannot accept the CAP being the only sector that is supposed to take cuts." He said the Parliament had made it clear that "we want to keep the CAP budget at its current size especially given the future challenges." George Lyon added that the extra €15 billion proposed for research and development is far outweighed by cuts of €40 billion to direct payments.   

In a parliamentary meeting on Tuesday (12th July) MEPs addressed current unfairness in CAP distribution, as direct payments between 'old' and 'new' member states currently vary from over €500 per hectare in Greece to less than €100 in Latvia. This is due to the system used to calculate the amount of direct support and the terms under which the bloc's Eastern enlargement agreements were struck.

A proposal was made to move towards “convergence” whereby states’ payments would move towards the average by 2020. However, some new member states rejected the plans as “insufficient,” saying reforms needed to be “bolder and swifter.”

French, Hungarian and Finnish MEPs also raised the idea of applying the same production criteria to imported food products as applied to EU farmers. They said that unless other countries’ produce is subject to the same rules and standards as EU farmers’, the situation would be “incomprehensible" for all stakeholders.