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Ireland pushes for CAP flexibility Flexibility for member states to design their own Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) strategic plans remains a key request of Ireland’s Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue TD, after a provisional deal was agreed in late June 2021. European Commissioner Frans Timmermans announced a provisional agreement had been reached by national governments, the European Parliament and the European Commission, following three years of tense negotiations. The deal will still require formal approval by member state agriculture ministers and the European Parliament but has been largely welcomed following a failure to reach agreement in mid-June. Failure to conclude future CAP policy had centred on resistance to the levels to which the EU is trying to align farming and its Green Deal, including a curb on the level of subsidies available. Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue had met with fellow agriculture ministers in mid-June as part of an informal meeting organised by Portugal’s head of the EU Agriculture Council, Maria do Céu Antunes, in what he described as a critical stage of the CAP negotiations. The informal meeting came in the days prior to a ‘super trialogue’ meeting, between the European Parliament and
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the Council of the European Union, mediated by the European Commission, designed to reach a final agreement. According to the Department, the Minister “again stressed the need for the reform outcome to provide the maximum possible flexibility for member states to design their CAP strategic plans”. In late May, ambitions to conclude the rules of a future CAP over the next seven years were not realised as some member states continued to push for a lowering of the amount of the €387 billion funding which is to be allocated for green ecoschemes and to limit the move to ensure subsidies are shared out more evenly among farmers. McConalogue had urged the Portuguese presidency to ensure the principle of flexibility underpins its engagements with other institutions. The current CAP was designed to be in place until 2020 and a transitional regulation is currently in place for 20212022, largely extending most of the CAP rules that were in place during the 2014-
20 period. CAP strategic plans are due to be implemented from 1 January 2023. The EU's CAP will spend €387 billion, around a third of the EU's 2021-2027 budget and it is estimated that more than €10 billion in subsidies to Irish farmers will be impacted by the future shape of the CAP. The future CAP is made up of three regulations in the form of strategic plans, horizontal governance, and the organisation of the common market for agricultural products. The main sticking points appeared to be in the region of strategic plans, specifically in relation to convergence. Convergence concerns are split into two distinct areas of internal and external convergence. While a need for convergence across member states has largely been accepted, some member states, including Ireland, retain an opposition to the levels of internal convergence, designed to flatten CAP payments for those farmers in receipt of payments beyond the national average
