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Meeting of the Parliament 03 October 2013

03 Oct 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Common Agricultural Policy

Lochhead, Richard SNP Moray Watch on SPTV

The debate on the common agricultural policy for 2014 to 2020 provides an opportunity for the Government to update Parliament on the state of play in the European Union negotiations and our preparations in Scotland and to explain the next steps. The debate is well timed, as EU-level agreement on the CAP package was confirmed only last week. Europe still has to finish the formal adoption procedures, which will take until November or December, but the content of the deal has now been decided.

This is a good time for the Government to update Parliament on that deal and its implications. Before delving into the detail, we should remind ourselves of the wider context. Nearly every country treats agriculture as a unique sector that often requires special treatment. Europe is no different. For 50 years, the CAP has supported European agriculture, initially to modernise it and recently to support its role in relation to the environment.

As we all know, here in Scotland, CAP funding is vital. At just under £600 million, last year’s receipts from the CAP were almost the same as the net income from farming, which was just over £600 million. In many cases, our industry’s survival depends on a successful CAP.

At the start of the process, one of our priorities was to bring new entrants and other excluded farmers into the CAP’s scope. We wanted to clamp down on slipper farming and to have sufficient coupled support to address declining livestock numbers. We supported greening the CAP, but we needed the details to be changed so that they would not affect farming operations disproportionately or have unintended consequences for the environment. We wanted to remove unnecessary red tape from the proposals and to have flexibility to tailor the new CAP to suit Scotland’s needs. Above all, we needed the United Kingdom Government to negotiate a decent outcome for us on the budget.

It is fair to say that we were successful on nearly all those priorities. We achieved changes that will put past and future new entrants on a level playing field. We secured the so-called Scottish clause to clamp down on slipper farmers and we resisted an ineffective active farmer test that would have tied us up in red tape. We got more flexibility, for example, to ensure that properly farmed heather will be eligible, to choose our own timescale for phasing out payments with a historical basis and to decide for ourselves whether to cap or reduce big individual payments—so-called degressivity.

We also achieved improvements on greening. The original proposals could have caused problems for farmers without commensurate environmental benefits. We secured a much more realistic version of the greening in the final text. Cropping records suggest that roughly 5,000 farmers will now be covered, but the majority already meet the rules. Only about 800 farmers will have to plant an additional crop under the cropping rules.

All those achievements are under pillar 1 of the policy, which relates to direct payments to farmers. There was perhaps less to play for under pillar 2, because the proposals were more for evolution than revolution. However, we still secured important flexibility in several areas. Perhaps the most important is on areas of natural constraint, which will replace less favoured areas under the new programmes.

Under pillars 1 and 2, our negotiating efforts were mostly successful. However, I was disappointed with the outcome on coupled support, which is the optional production-linked support, such as headage payments, to maintain types of farming in areas where that is particularly important. The original proposals gave Scotland 5 per cent coupled support, on the bottom tier of a two-tier system. In the final deal, we will have the option of 8 per cent, which is nearly double our existing coupled support under the beef scheme.

However, the system still has two tiers, which I and most farmers in Scotland believe is fundamentally unfair. The 8 per cent is also well below the 10 to 15 per cent that the Brian Pack inquiry recommended.

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Meeting of the Parliament 03 October 2013

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