The Fischler's Proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy: Paving the Way for the Future?

The Mid-Term Review proposals presented by the European Commission in July 2002 and January 2003 correspond no doubt to the most radical CAP reform since the latter was established in the early 1960's. This is not because these proposals include firm commitments on market access and export competition dossiers in the perspective of WTO talks. The proposals are silent on these points. This is because they finally achieve the shift from product to producer support by replacing all existing or newly introduced direct income payments, with a few exceptions, by a single decoupled payment per farm, based on historical references and conditional upon cross-compliance to environmental, animal welfare as well as food security and quality criteria. In addition, they expand the scope of rural development instruments to promote food quality, meet higher standards and foster animal welfare and they increase amounts available for rural development by transferring funds from the first to the second pillar via the introduction of an EU-wide system of degression and modulation. This paper discusses these proposals from both an external and internal point of view. We analyse to what extent the MTR proposals could facilitate the EU negotiation position in the WTO. From a domestic point of view, these proposals correspond to appropriate changes in the right direction with however some important qualifications. We analyse these qualifications. We also discuss to what extent the MTR proposals should be considered as the ultimate reform of the CAP or as the third step, after 1992 and 1999, in the long-term process where public intervention would be mainly reserved for correcting market failures, notably the promotion of positive externalities and public goods as well as the reduction in risk and instability faced by agricultural producers.Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), decoupling, cross-compliance, modulation, WorldTrade Organisation (WTO)

Agricultural policies in France: from EU regulation to national design.

The present document presents the French way EU agricultural policies have been, are, and will be, implemented, considering not only the means but also financing resources and procedures to achieve the national agricultural goals. For a better understanding a review of the CAP foundations is firstly provided in order to address the historic issues of the evolution of European agricultural policies. Then, main agricultural highlights of the French situation are briefly depicted, in order to better frame the two head points that are the French translation of markets policy on the one hand and of rural development on the other hand. Both issues are policy-oriented and sketches of national underlying strategies are given whenever the available data were relevant enough.EU Agricultural Policies, France

The role of public subsidies on farms’ managerial efficiency: An application of a five-stage approach to France

This paper applies a five-step approach to the investigation of the relationship between public subsidies, namely CAP direct payments, and managerial efficiency for French COP and beef farms in 2000. Managerial efficiency scores are calculated using a four-step approach that allows disentangling managerial inefficiency from unfavourable external conditions. Then, in a fifth stage, managerial efficiency scores are regressed over a set of explanatory variables, including CAP direct payments. Using individual farm data and meteorological data at the municipality level, we show that there is a non negligible component of inefficiency that is due to unfavourable conditions, and there is a strong significant negative relationship between managerial efficiency and CAP direct payments.technical efficiency, managerial efficiency, direct payments, farms, France

Le bilan de santé de la PAC, le découplage et l’élevage en zones difficiles

Le 20 novembre 2008, le Conseil européen des ministres de l’agriculture a adopté, dans le cadre du bilan de santé de la PAC, plusieurs modifications des règles de mise en oeuvre de cette politique. Cet article discute, sous la forme de questions - réponses, de quelques implications de ces évolutions, plus spécifiquement celles relatives au découplage accru des mesures de soutien des revenus agricoles pour les exploitations françaises localisées dans les zones difficiles et orientées vers les productions d’herbivores (bovins lait, bovins viande et ovins-caprins). Si le maintien d’un couplage de la prime au maintien du troupeau de vaches allaitantes et de la prime à la brebis est souvent considéré, en France, comme un acquis plutôt positif à court terme, il convient néanmoins de réfléchir à des instruments alternatifs d’intervention qui pourraient être privilégiés, demain, pour favoriser les activités d’élevage dans les zones difficiles au double titre environnemental et territorial. Cette  réflexion est d’autant plus nécessaire que la PAC est fortement concernée par les perspectives budgétaires de l’Union européenne pour l’après-2013 et que la question de la légitimité des soutiens publics agricoles est toujours en débat

How the EU Single Farm Payment should be modelled: lump-sum transfers, area payments or… what else?

The 2003 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform radically changes the way the European Union (EU) supports its agricultural sector by decoupling direct payments. Production is no longer required to get the payment attached to Single Farm Payment (SFP) entitlements. However, the new scheme maintains a specific link between payments and hectares; in addition, SFP entitlements can be exchanged among farmers. These features question the way SFP entitlements should be regarded, hence modelled, i.e., as lump-sum transfers, area payments or… something else. We develop a microeconomic analytical framework which shows that the answer crucially depends on the total number of entitlements which are initially made available relative to the number of hectares, more specifically the number of cultivated hectares in a zero support regime, the number of cultivated hectares in a policy support regime trough per-hectare direct aids, and the number of cultivated or idled hectares in a policy regime where support is granted through direct aids per hectare and production is not required.European Union, Common Agricultural Policy, Single Farm Payment, modelling, area payments, lump-sum transfers

Scénarios de réforme de la politique laitière européenne : impacts sur la structure des exploitations laitières françaises

Pas de résumé

Les réformes de la PAC de mars 1999 et de juin 2003 : principales dispositions

Les réformes de la politique agricole commune (PAC) de mars 1999 (réforme Agenda 2000) et de juin 2003 (compromis de Luxembourg) s'inscrivent dans un processus commencé quelques années plus tôt avec la réforme de 1992 (réforme MacSharry). Loin de supprimer l'intervention et de libéraliser totalement les marchés, la réforme de 1992 constitue néanmoins une rupture. Elle propose en effet de diminuer le soutien par les prix et de compenser les pertes induites de revenu par des aides directes assises sur les facteurs de production terre (céréales et oléoprotéagineux) et cheptel (viande bovine). La réforme de 1999 correspond à un pas de plus dans la même direction, avec de nouvelles baisses des prix institutionnels et la compensation partielle des pertes de revenu par des aides directes toujours assises sur les facteurs primaires de production. La réforme de 2003 va encore plus loin en supprimant le lien entre les aides directes et les choix de produits, en d'autres termes en "découplant" les aides directes de soutien des revenus agricoles. Cette note présente les principales dispositions des deux réformes de 1999 et de 2003.

Expliquer les évolutions des cours des matières premières agricoles : À l’impossible, nul n’est tenu !

How to explain the recent developments in the prices of agricultural raw materials? This article tries to trace the chronology of events and identify the mechanisms by which factors of change in agricultural prices act. From this analysis of temporal and causal effects an important lesson emerges, namely the difficulty if not the impossibility to isolate the responsibility of a particular determinant, even more to quantify it. Hence also the need to develop the economic analysis of agricultural prices, of their trends and determinants, including through the use of quantitative structural models, i.e., models that explicitly derived suplly and demand functions from behaviours of private and public actors

Sortir du régime des quotas laitiers ? Paramètres clés à considérer et illustration dans le cas françaisd

Pas de résumé