Yves Madre from the Cabinet presented the legislative proposals. M. Madre spoke frankly to French lobby representatives, defending Ciolos’ vision, although he could be considered as the French guy in the cabinet.
There were many reactions from farmers’ organisations expressing their fears regarding:
- the future of the beef and wine sectors
- the high level of greening
- the time needed for internal convergence of subsidies
- the fact that equity does not mean equality for convergence among member states: a uniform payment is not relevant because internal, regional and sub-regional constraints are not uniform among farmers
- the lack of market measures on Pillar One
- the uncertainties surrounding the budget that could jeopardize the European Commission projects: Is there a Plan B should the debt crisis reset EU priorities?
French NGO’s reacted first after checking the final versions, saying “yes on convergence, but greening measures are already in place in France”. Farm lobbies were confused during the briefing as some of the aspects that they had argued against had been deleted by the Commission i.e. the uniform payment for the whole of EU-27 by 2028. All that had been left in was the following sentence: “As of claim year 2019 at the latest, all payment entitlements in a Member State or, in case of application of Article 20, in a region, shall have a uniform unit value”.
Farmers’ organisations reacted very negatively: they had not anticipated the fact that non-compliance with greening measures could cut basic payment according to Article n°66 of the horizontal regulation. So we should expect they will strongly lobby against greening…
Finally, there were few reactions to Pillar 2 in France, except in terms of Agri-Environmental Measure (AEM) schemes and Less Favoured Areas (LFA) payments: it is important to keep them.
