Simplification of the Common Agricultural Policy

Czeti, András – Nyitrai, Zoltán

Keywords: technical simplification, Common Market Organisation, intervention, governing committee

The policies and legal materials of the EU are being swept towards complexity by compromises that try to take equal account of the interests of the 27 member states. Alongside increasingly complicated and not transparent regulation, however, the economic actors and society in the broadest sense, i.e. the taxpayers, have voiced a demand requiring simplification. For this reason, one of the EU’s most urgent tasks at the moment has become the simplification of the union’s legal material, particularly the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The European Commission has already made significant efforts in this respect; the newest stage of this process being the recommendation on the Council’s agenda to summarise the 21 basic CMO decisions that form the basis of CAP regulation, into a single, comprehensive law.
The plan, promulgated on 18th December 2006, summarises the basic laws governing agricultural produce that falls under the remit of the CAP, following the organisational principle of technical simplicity. In other words, according to primary law it does not change the background policies. The wording does, however, deviate in many places from the rules laid down in the basic CMO decisions. So, for example, it omits the possible intervention of buying-up pork, it transfers areas of competence from the Council to the Commission, as well as changing the procedural system of the governing committee. Hungarian interests require that the effects of the decision should not extend to those sectors currently being reformed (fruit and vegetables, wine); that the possibility of intervention in pork should remain; that strategically important decision-making should remain the Council’s province; and that rules affecting the wheat sector should be drafted according to the wheat CMO’s basic decision.