EU Member States Agree Partial Position on Next Common Agricultural Policy
EU member states agreed a provisional opinion this week on how the next Common Agricultural Policy should work. The deal keeps some of the European Commission's proposals from last summer but also makes notable changes.
European Union member states agreed a provisional position this week on how the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) should work. The CAP is the EU's shared system for supporting and regulating agriculture, so the decisions matter to farmers across the bloc. The agreement was first reported by the Irish farming news outlet Agriland.
According to the outlet, this partial agreement preserves some controversial aspects of the proposals the European Commission, the EU's executive body, put forward last summer. At the same time, member states have made several notable changes to what the Commission suggested.
Definitions of active and young farmers
Some of those changes concern how the new plan defines an "active" and a "young" farmer. Such definitions are important because they affect which farmers can qualify for support. The short introduction available from the source does not set out the specific criteria, so the exact definitions can be found only in the full Agriland article.
Because the member states' opinion is provisional and the agreement is only partial, the final content of the next CAP has not yet been settled.
