Although members of the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee spent two days this week working through a record number of amendments to the EU Commission's Common Agricultural Policy reform proposals, commentators have stated that the CAP deal remains far from sealed.

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The CAP reform process, the first in which the Parliament will play such a decisive role, has been marred by disunity, accusations MEPs are upholding corporate interests and backbiting between EU legislators. The reforms agreed upon by the committee and unveiled on Thursday were subject to harsh criticism from across the board, though the industrial farming lobby in Europe welcomed the outcome of this week's voting.

Yorkshire Labour MEP Linda McAvan remarked, "A lot of colleagues are not satisfied with the compromises made in the agricultural committee." Her colleague on the environmental committee, German social democrat Dagmar Roth-Behrendt added "the views of [of the agriculture committee] are light years apart" from those of the environment and food committee, and the EP plenary as a whole.

The agriculture committee voted to balance payments between member states and cap subsidies for large farmers and landowners, but also opted to weaken 'greening' regulations. Environment committee MEPs speculated that this decision is at odds with the wishes of the rest of the plenary.

Controversy over double payments

On Wednesday, Europe's leading environmental NGOs warned that, due in part to the weakening of greening measures, adoption of certain amendments could result in farmers being paid twice if their activities are deemed to be 'green by definition', directly contravening EU law. WWF and the European Environmental Bureau suggested farmers could be paid for greening as part of the typical CAP payment, then again as part of a stewardship measure.

Although EU legislators maintain that in order to qualify for extra stewardship payments farmers would need to demonstrate they were doing more to protect the environment than the minimum measures required to receive CAP subsidies, EEB said on Wednesday that erosion of the 'greening' elements put forward by the Commission has led some "MEPs and member states [to push for] their farmers to keep getting the same subsidies for doing pretty much the same [as they do now]."

EEB's policy officer, Faustine Defossez, said the CAP continues to suffer from a fundamental lack of legitimacy. Adding, "The latest vote in the European Parliament to pay farmers twice for the same work [terming them], 'green by definition' regardless of the measures included in certifications scheme, the level of ambition and the disparity of these systems within the EU, shows that for some MEPs this reform is not about restoring legitimacy but to continue a ‘money for free’ approach."

Conservative MEP Julie Girling, who branded the greening measures championed by the Commission 'greenwash', and an attempt to retain high farm subsidy payments, told the BBC on Tuesday, "The process in Parliament is extremely complicated. We are voting on a series of elaborate compromises which contain many elements each – so it may well be that at the end of the day we will have voted for double payments. If that’s the case we will have to get it taken out at a later stage. This reform process is in danger of taking policy two steps backwards."

Girling's party want to see subsidy payments removed or drastically reduced, which they claim will make farming 'more responsive to the market'. Although this neoliberal approach goes against the initial rationale behind EU farming subsidies; ensuring everyone in the bloc has access to affordable food, the way in which subsidies are delivered has caused much controversy and irked many environment and social justice groups.

Green MEPs slam lack of transparency, weakening of CAP greening

Dutch Green agriculture spokesperson Bas Eickhout MEP maintained that the CAP is in need of radical reform. He outlined his grievances after voting on Thursday, "MEPs regrettably voted to maintain damaging export refunds which dump EU farm products onto fragile markets in developing countries, and chose not to monitor the effects of the CAP on long term food production capacity in developing countries."

He continued, "They also drastically slashed cross compliance and voted to remove bans on hormone use, groundwater pollution, large-scale soil erosion and ploughing up wetlands. This is clearly at odds with what the public wants and these senseless proposals to use taxpayers' money to fund an outdated system will not be accepted by the public."

Eickhout's colleague, German Green MEP Martin Häusling was also deeply critical of the votes' outcome. He said, "The plans will clearly fail to fundamentally shift EU agriculture to a sustainable path. Instead of real crop rotation with legumes, which is a win-win-win for the environment, fertility and lowering farmers' costly dependency on chemicals and rainforest-destroying soya imports, the CAP will promote weaker crop 'diversification'. Proposals on double-funding, whereby farmers would get paid twice to do the same thing, are unacceptable at a time of budget wrangling and public austerity. Scandalously, MEPs even voted against full transparency of how the CAP budget is distributed."

MEPs reiterated this week that, with much negotiation over the reforms' future still to come, and such disparate views held by various committees of MEPs, different member states and the Commission on the role agricultural subsidies should play in the next budget period, a simple, satisfactory reform process looks almost impossible.   

The committee's agreements will now be voted on by the European Parliament as a whole; this should occur in March. Meanwhile, the European Council is expected to negotiate a figure for the next budget period (2014-2020) at its upcoming meeting on 7th February. Due to various hold ups with CAP reforms and the EU budget, the new policies are extremely unlikely to be implemented before 2015.

Although Agriculture Committee chair Paolo de Castro said on Thursday that such a move would be "inacceptable", as the EU's largest single area of spending, the CAP is likely to suffer as a result of significant cuts to the budget, in line with the desires of many influential nations including the UK and Germany.