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Saturday, February 6, 2021
“Disappointing and sobering”
Agriculture ministers squabble at conference
The federal states must find a common line for European agricultural policy. The responsible ministers deliberate for a full eleven hours. In the end, those involved are exhausted, but they never got closer. Time is of the essence.
The Agricultural Ministers Conference (AMK) was deeply divided when it voted on a national strategy for the Common European Agricultural Policy (CAP). After eleven hours of online consultation, participants expressed their disappointment on Friday night. I have never experienced such a difficult conference, said Baden-Württemberg Agriculture Minister Peter Hauk.
Her friend from the CDU party, Julia Klöckner, spoke of “very manageable” results. It is “disappointing and sobering” what has come out in this long time or what has not. “I think it is a missed opportunity for agriculture ministers in countries that have not made decisions about what originally concerns them,” Klöckner said.
As evidence, he cited disagreement over the reallocation of funds from the so-called first pillar of the CAP, direct payments, to the second pillar, rural development, for the transition year 2022. The new funding period will start in 2023. The government The federal government will now run out of a recommendation from the AMK and will only present its own proposal to the ministerial vote with minutes.
According to AMK chief Wolfram Günther, the green minister for agriculture in Saxony, the CDU-led countries had not wanted to transfer more than six percent of the funds from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2. The Greens estimated 10 percent for this. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania department head Till Backhaus contributed 7.5 percent as a pledge and wanted to use 1.5 percent of this for an insect and bird protection program. In the end, you couldn’t make yourself understood at all.
Agriculture ministers agreed to promote young farmers, for example. All decisions of the conference must be made unanimously.
Second conference in the next six months
A controversial point was interpreted differently in the subsequent press conference, which began six hours late and in which there was no shortage of mutual accusations. Wolfram Günther emphasized again that agriculture ministers would first have to wait for the European committees to agree, the trialogue, before they can derive concrete content for the national strategy.
Klöckner, for his part, referred to the time frame and presented it as a parallel process. Germany had to present its strategic plan to the EU by the end of 2021. But already in June, the Bundestag meets for the last time before the summer holidays and then the Bundestag elections follow with the subsequent formation of a government. There is not much time left. Now there should be another special AMK, when the trialogue will probably end in the second quarter of 2020.
Later, Hauk drew a line between the Union, the SPD and the Left on one side and the Greens on the other. At least in one point, the fronts appeared to be different. Günther and Backhaus regretted that there was no joint consultation with the Conference of Environment Ministers, which would make sense in view of the EU’s goal of a green agricultural policy. However, this failed due to the countries led by the CDU. After all, ten German agriculture ministers are also responsible for the environment, he said.
