Newsflash

ARC NEWSFLASH JULY 2012 Dear friends and supporters of ARC2020July has been another busy month for the ARC2020 network. A highlight for us were the two days we spent in Brussels. On July 12th we held a very productive planning meeting for the Good Food March. From across Europe, national coordinators for the march came together to present their plans and share ideas for the next few months. With national level events now planned in cities such as Bucharest, Lisbon, Naples, and Vienna, alongside the main bike tour to Brussels, the march is really beginning to take shape. If you want to organise an event, don’t hesitate to get in contact with your national representative, and let us know so we can add it to the Good Food March map! The second event we attended on July 13th was held in the EU Commission. We were at the ‘CAP Towards 2020 – Taking Stock with Civil Society‘ conference, which included speakers from the ARC network: Goran Soster – Coordinator of the PREPARE Network, Jan Plagge, […]

Dear friends and supporters of ARC As summer fast approaches, things are really hotting up in the ARC2020 Office. On May 30th we released the GOOD FOOD MARCH – CALL FOR ACTION in 10 languages!! The Good Food March will kick off this August, seeing people from across Europe travel to Brussels – by bike, tractor or any other means – to demand a real reform of the CAP. Participants will arrive in Brussels in time for a conference being organised by Slow Food and ARC2020 on Septemeber 19th.  If that wasn’t enough, our first Speakers Tour is also about to set off. From June 19th to June 30th, 3 farmes from 3 continents – USA, Africa and Europe – will travel to different locations to discuss the global implications of the CAP. A key part of the tour will be a public debate on June 20th in Brussels – details to follow. Elsewhere in the network, May saw the launch of the new www.globalagriculture.org website. Coinciding with the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), […]

Dear friends and supporters of ARC Today ARC has released a CALL FOR ACTION… In the next two weeks, MEPs will be finalising their intial reactions to the legislative proposals for reform released by the EU Commission in October. There is still opportunity to influence these reports, but we must be quick. There are 2 ways to do this. Firstly by signing a petition, issued by our friends at Slow Food Youth Network, and secondly, by writing to your MEP stating your demands. ARC today released its own reaction to the Commission’s proposals – you are welcome to use this to help create your own messsage for parliamentarians. Building on the demands highlighted in our new paper, and reflecting current developments in a number of Member States, ARC issued a press release yesterday expressing concern about steps being taken to weaken the greening elements of the CAP. On April 17th – the International Day of Peasant Struggle – ARC, along with APRODEV, Corporate Europe Obsevatory, CONCORD, the European Environmental Bureau, European Coordination Via Campensina, Food and […]

Dear friends and supporters of ARC Welcome to the latest issue of the ARC NEWSFLASH!  March has seen a number of fantastic guest blogs be submitted to us from across the globe. Sophie Herbert, EU nature Policy officer at BirdLife Europe provided an article about EU environment ministers failing to stand up for nature in the face of farm lobby interests. This was followed by an article from the RSPB about a group of farmers that travelled to Brussels to call for greater support for environmental measures in the CAP. Véronique Rioufol from Terre de Liens raised the issue of land access, whilst our partners at the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy  in the US provided us with an insight into controlling crop price volatility. If you want to write a piece for our site, simply send your article to the email address below. This month ARC2020 also issued a press release with BirdLife Europe, The European Environmental Bureau, WWF, IFOAM EU Group, Friends of the Earth Europe and Pesticide Action Network following the decision of the EU Commission’s health and consumers department to remove the obligation on countries and farmers to […]

ARC NEWSFLASH FEBRUARY 2012 Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Dear friends and supporters of ARC2020 Welcome to the latest issue of the ARC NEWSFLASH!  This month has seen a number of new features for our website. Firstly, your organisation can now become a Friend of the ARC. Friends of the ARC are organisations who may not have signed our Communication, but are interested or engaged in a profound reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, support the work of ARC and want to help us build a strong voice. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want to add your organisation to the list and embark on the ARC! Secondly, we have started developing a series of pages known as Voices for Change…you can read more on this below. Finally, we also have a new video on our homepage: check it out! ARC has welcomed a number of guests bloggers on our site this month, such as this piece from BirdLife Europe. We have also provided articles for others, see for example an article about our correspondents posted on the European Social Journalism website. If you want […]

Dear friends of the ARC! Welcome to the December issue of the ARC NEWSFLASH! Thank you for your feedback on the new website – keep it coming and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook! We also now have a banner with the ARC logo which you can display on your site to let others know about our network – find it here and add it today! Discover who our web correspondents have been talking to in Latest from EU Member States, read our “main stories” and keep up to date with recent developments in the ARC blog – and don’t hesitate to get in touch and add to our lively debate on how best to make our farming and food systems more sustainable and accessible for all. This month ARC gained exciting new signatories. One of them is Slow Food International! Work has also continued with international organisations such as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade (IATP) in the USA, as well as those working on the local level, with local action groups from England and Sweden visiting our secretariat in Brussels. We would like to […]

Dear friends of a sustainable CAP reform and a rural renaissance in EuropeWelcome to the new ARC Newsflash! As decision making and debate on the CAP reform is now shifting to the national level, it is vital that we keep up to date with what ministers and Members of the European Parliament are saying – in Brussels and at home. From now on, our newsletter will be delivered once a month, and contain an overview of developments in Brussels, mini-reports on key meetings, details of forthcoming events, both public and policy-related, and a special feature from the ARC network. Your feedback is welcome to make it as useful as possible for all of you. We are also keen to hear your comments on the new arc2020.eu website launched today!!! You can enter them directly in the open forum (a new space where we will initiate discussions around the CAP reform – your suggestions welcome!) or send them directly to the new ARC Communications team. In my new role as website editor, I now have the […]

European Parliament’s Dess Report adopted, but falls behind expectations On 25 May, the European Parliament’s Committee on Agricultural and Rural Development (COMAGRI), as expected, has adopted a report setting out its views on the CAP towards 2020. The committee found a compromise position on the huge differences between the political groups about the future of European farmers and rural regions and so avoided a false start into it newly-endowed co-decision powers. That is the good news. The bad news is that the message is not sufficiently concrete or ambitious, and does not respond to the expectations of civil society as laid down in our ARC communication which was published in parallel with Commissioner Ciolos’s reform proposals last year. We are missing a clear statement by the Parliament on how the future Common Agricultural Policy will organise the urgently needed transition towards sustainable farming and food systems, with synergies between plant and animal production, good management of biodiversity, soils and water through crop rotation and a serious reduction of non-renewable inputs like fertilisers, pesticides and oil-based […]

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Rural development and the linking of EU Funds The CAP debate in Brussels: An inside view by Michael Dower For the last year, ARC has been calling for the CAP post 2013 to be focused on a Paradigm shift in agriculture and a Rural Renaissance. We urged that the current second pillar of the CAP, which contains the rural development measures, should be succeeded by a true Rural Policy, and that this Policy should have a strong element of local delivery, building upon the LEADER experience but able to draw down funds not only from the CAP but also from the Regional, Social and Fisheries funds of the EU. So, we were delighted when, in August last year, the Commissioners for Agriculture, Regions, Employment and Fisheries wrote a joint letter to the President of the Commission proposing that, from 2014 onwards, there should be a joint strategic framework for the rural, regional, cohesion, social and fisheries funds. In the ARC Communication, published in November 2010, we suggested how this link between the main developmental funds […]

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