EU launches "health check" of multi-billion-dollar farms policy

Nov 20, 2007, 14:31 GMT

Brussels - The European Union launched on Tuesday a so- called 'health check' review of its agriculture policy - the most expensive issue in its portfolio, and one of the most explosive.

'It's quite normal for perfectly healthy people to visit their doctor to see whether they need to do anything different... In the same way, we need to look at whether we need to adjust the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for an EU of 27 and a rapidly changing world,' EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said.

Under the health check, the Commission is set to consult with EU member states, farmers and NGOs over ways to make the CAP more effective without making it more expensive.

The CAP is already the EU's costliest policy, accounting for some 50 billion euros (73.3 billion dollars) per year - over 40 per cent of the total EU budget - in a complex system of payments based on farm size, type of crop and volume produced, among other factors.

And the Commission now wants to launch a debate on issues such as capping payments to the largest farms, increasing the minimum amount of land a farmer has to own to qualify for payments, and imposing tighter environmental rules on farmers.

Any such debate is likely to be heated, however. The CAP has often been the source of bitter contention between member states - most recently in 2003, when a major reform fell foul of an all-out row between France and Britain.

France is the largest recipient of CAP funds, while Britain receives a multi-billion-euro rebate from the EU every year because it gets so little from the CAP. Each side regularly accuses the other of taking unfair advantage of the system.

The Commission is expected to propose legally-binding changes to the current CAP in spring 2008.