For Argyll

With the EC announcement of planned reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Richard Lochhead, Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment, said yesterday in Brussels: ‘The debate in Scotland on the future of CAP starts now’. The Scottish Government is shortly to seek consultations on this matter. The proposed EC reforms include:

• Abolishing set-asides. The intention here is to maximise production potential
• Partial move from coupled payments to the Single Payment Scheme
• Phasing out Milk Quotas by April 2015, eased by five successive annual quota increases of 1%
• Move from historically-based payments to a flatter rate - the tradition of making payments to farmers on the basis of what they were granted in a past reference year will be phased out
• More flexibility within Article 68 - Member states would be freer to apply the retained 10% of direct payments to different sectors, even to support risk management measures like insurance against natural disasters
• Rise in modulation retentions and introduction of graduated retentions - the current 5% retained from direct aid grants to farmers of over £5,000 will rise to 13% by 2012 and additional % retentions would be made in the cases of bigger farms receiving more direct aid. The funding retained in this way could be applied by member states to, for example, programmes in renewable energy and water management
• Removal of interventions - for example, interventions for pig meat, rice and durum wheat will be abolished and interventions for feed grains will be set at zero.