Submitted by laborate on Tue, 18/10/2011 - 13:37 GMT.
Last October 14th the General Director of Agriculture
of the European Union, José Manuel Silva Rodríguez, gave
the lecture entitled "The financial prospects of the Common
Agricultural Policy reform". This lecture is part of the
Master on Sustainable Land Planning
organized by the USC.
In his speech, Silva Rodríguez,
highlighted the three new guiding principles of the new
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP):
- Redistribution of benefits.
- Convergence, understood as equal economic support for homogenous agricultural regions.
- Green element as compensation for environmental and social benefits resulting from agricultural activities.
The appearance of this three new elements is also noteworthy:
- Crisis funds (for instance, the recent E. coli outbreak).
- Funds to avoid the effects of globalization.
- An agricultural research program.
Silva Rodríguez also explained the reasons linking financial
aid to land instead of individual farmers, the disappearance
of historical payments and the potential conflicts with
other European and international policies ("green box" and
"blue box", World Trade Organization
treaties currently in force, ...). He also highlighted that
Brussels obligation is to govern "for everybody", and that
difficulties of managing the territory should be taken into
account.
He also said that a long debate in the European Parliament
is expected, talked about the distribution of funds within
each country and declared that national leaders should be
responsable of managing their own territory, appealing them
not to use "Europe" to avoid their responsibilities.
The conference ended with a round of open questions, where
civil servants and representatives of trade unions and cooperatives,
among others, presented their points of view about the CAP
and formulated some questions.
Finally in a different event, Silva Rodriguez taught master students a lesson on the new CAP.
related links