Reform of the common agricultural policy needs to translate into keeping an ‘adequate’ community budget that should primarily finance major programmes, without removing funding from national budgets, Agriculture Minister Mihail Dumitru said yesterday, quoted by Mediafax.
“Romania supports keeping financing from both the EU and national budgets, with the note that major programmes should be mainly funded from the community budget. We do not agree to a re-nationalisation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP),” the minister stated.
As for the CAP architecture, keeping the two pillars – direct payments and market measures and rural development – is considered to be a necessity, Dumitru said, adding that direct payments should be ‘balanced’ against EU-level payments, that the historical reference based on which the current payments have been established should be removed and that the single per-area payment scheme should be further preserved.
Dumitru is of the opinion that ‘a safety net’ has to be in place for situations of crisis by developing new market intervention tools to ensure EU agricultural competitiveness with third countries as well as under price volatility conditions. “We need an EU financial mechanism for risk management that should be also available in situations of deep crisis and should be flexible enough to yield fast results,” the minister said.
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