Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development HEARING Public hearing on "A new funding structure for the CAP"
25 June 2026
Contents updated on 25 Jun 2026
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AGRI European Parliament
Follow its sittings04:24 - 07:40
Speaker 2
So, dear colleagues, good morning to everyone. Let's start our meeting. Let's move into the agenda. Adoption of the agenda. Anyone against?
This is not the case. The agenda is adopted. Chair's announcement. Today's meeting is webstreamed. We have interpreters for 16 languages.
Then we move to top three of the agenda, public hearing on a new funding structure for the Common Agriculture Policy, consequences for farmers and national authorities. Dear colleagues, I would like to welcome you and our invited experts to this public hearing on the new funding structure of the Common Agriculture Policy. The Budget and REGI committees are jointly responsible with AGRI committee for the national and regional partnership regulation, as you are aware, and are invited to take part to this hearing. And I would like to welcome the colleagues of these committees who are here today. I don't think this is the case for now.
And in particular, and he is not there, our colleague van Overtveldt and colleague Benea is as well not there for the moment. As a complement to the workshop we held in April on the budgetary and government aspects of the legislative proposal of the Commission, this hearing is meant to provide us with targeted insights on their practical and strategic implication for farmers and national authorities. As you can see from today's program, our experts will address key aspects of the draft regulations currently under discussion, which I believe will usefully feed into our work on the amendments to the national and regional partnership regulation, the CAP regulation, and the budget expenditure tracking and performance regulation. During our first panel on the new budgetary and operational functioning of the CAP, Ms. Maria Skovager Østergaard, vice-chair of the working party on direct payments at COPA-COGECA, and Luc Vernet, secretary general of Farm Europe, who are both with us today, will focus on the possible impacts on farmers. For our second panel, and with remote participation this time, Mr. Hofner, head of Austria's management authority, and Ms. Catapavila, director general of Spain's national paying agency, will analyze the opportunities and constraints of the Commission proposal.
Policy analysis of the Commission's DG Agriculture will take the floor. I thank for her participation. I kindly ask all speakers to respect our six-minute limit and now give the floor to Ms. Skovgaard Østergaard, please. You have the floor.
07:40 - 11:30
Speaker 1
Thank you very much and thank you for inviting Copa and Cogeca today to have a bit of the farmer's view on the structure of these new proposals for the coming CAP. We are very happy to be here because you are a very important co-legislator in this group and you have a large influence on the future for the European farmers in the common CAP period. I would like to show a PowerPoint. No, sorry, guys, it was a joke. Okay.
Sorry, no, I didn't produce it. Okay. But so what is important from the legislator's point of view is that you create a toolbox that will be available for member states and farmers and that will actually be useful for the member states and for the farmers. And therefore the most important task that you have is to design some good tools that are actually available and useful for the farmers. At least in the current CAP we have seen examples that in the current CAP there were new opportunities which in practice did not really work well for farmers.
I come from Denmark and there we spent a lot of time on trying to design a tool where farmers could actually have incentives to have small biotopes in the eligible areas for support. But it turned out that this tool was actually too rigid. It needed to be controlled a lot. There was a lot of limitations on how to use it and that meant that in practice the Danish farmers did not use this tool that much as we would have hoped for or expected because that would actually have been very beneficial for biodiversity. This is just one example.
But when you look at the future toolbox, it's quite complicated with all these new regulations. We have the single fund proposal and we have the CAP proposal. And it's no secret that Copa and Cogeca would like to have had things been differently, but we also know that this is now the structure that we are negotiating in. So of course we would recommend that we move as many articles as possible that are CAP-related into the CAP regulations. And also when you look at the planning process of this new large single fund, that you look into having still having closeness to the farmers when deciding on how to implement for the farmers.
Because what we fear is that now that we have a planning process of a very large fund at the national level, that this process will come further away from the farmers and then we will have more practical problems that will not end up being really solved in a good way from the farmer's point of view. And then if you look at control systems, the European Commission has also suggested some changes there, for example for the control of conditionality, which in the future will be called farm stewardship, where this control should now be decentralized. In some member states this will mean that actually the controls will be much more complicated in the future because it will involve many more local municipalities, so on and so forth.