New Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from 2014 to 2020

Last week the Council of Ministers of Agriculture of the EU gave finally closed the negotiation of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for 2014-2020.
After two years of negotiations, the result of this policy has been quite encouraging for Spain due to the absence of many of the changes to be expected with this new CAP and that disadvantaged sectors most Spanish.
Below are the main points of this reform:

• It keeps the budget. Spain will receive a total of about 47,000 million which, together with the national rural development aid, will provide a total of more than 50,000 million euros to hand out during the period 2014-2020. This figure finally removed the existing suspicions about a possible reduction in the budget for the new PAC.
• Support for producer organizations. This new policy gives special support to producer organizations providing measures to reinforce their competitiveness and market protection. For sectors such as olives are to enable new price stabilization measures, such as withdrawal or gift product, and that add to the already authorized private storage.
• There will be a flat rate. The flat rate or application of the same aid per hectare for all crops posed a major disadvantage for areas requiring more substantial aid. Finally, we have limited the comparison of aid to 60%. Besides this aid will be regulated not only by the development of production and the market, but also by the actual production costs.
• Regionalization or regionalization. It will establish a regionalization system which will indicate between 35 and 45 regions distributed by surface type and amount of aid a like. This will prevent the transfer unbalanced subsidies between different sectors and communities.
• Active farmer. It designates the active farmer or intended recipient of CAP subsidies and creating a negative list to receive these grants which include airlines, railroads, real estate, sports and recreation.
• Greening or green policy. It will promote green practices linking 30% of CAP direct payments to certain activities such as maintaining pastures, diversify crops or maintain areas of ecological interest. This does not affect permanent crops such as olive groves, vineyards, nuts, citrus and fruit so what will be considered in advance within this green policy.

After the negotiations for the Government and the Autonomous Communities agree their position on the new CAP and launch marked regionalization process. This new policy will take effect in early 2014 and the new direct payments apply starting from autumn 2015.