Spain advances in work to maintain the budget of the CAP
The acting Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, spoke on Wednesday at the XII Congress of Agrarian Economy, in Lugo, to talk about one of the “great challenges we have as a nation, such as Spain, which is the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2021-2027.
Planas has advanced that it is expected to meet in October with the Agricultural Advisory Committee, with environmental organizations and will hold a monographic meeting with the autonomies to discuss the final leg of the national strategic plan of the CAP, whose preparation has already begun at a technical level and that Spain will present in Brussels in early 2021.
He has insisted that Spain will defend for the post 2020 CAP to maintain the same budget as in the current programming period.
In this sense, he hopes to be able to maintain for Spain an endowment of about 50,000 million euros (between the European endowment, that of the general administration of the State and the autonomous communities. A sum for the seven years in question “very important” for the primary sector and that supposes an average support in the entrance of the farmers of 30% of the average of the agricultural and cattle farms of Spain.
Today, he said, the European Parliament (EP) Committee on Agriculture has met for the first time in a working session and in two weeks, in Helsinki, it will meet with the other community ministers, under the Finnish presidency, to advance in the dossier of the CAP reform. A dossier, he recalled, has two basic aspects: the financial endowment of the CAP 2021-2027 that will be decided by the Heads of State and Government of the EU and the debate of the three regulations that are the axis of the new CAP .
The minister has predicted that these discussions will last until the spring of next year and has hoped to be able to move on to the “Spanish-Spanish” debate, that is, how to apply the CAP in the whole of Spain, taking into account the key role of the autonomies from the point of view of the competence in the execution of the same.
On the other hand, the minister has welcomed the extension of the fishing agreement between Mauritania-EU, known today, and that will benefit vessels from Andalusia, the Canary Islands, Galicia and the Basque Country. It has valued this extension for one year, since the agreement expired on November 15 and in this way, until November 2020, there will be continuity in this fishing ground for Spanish fishermen, while negotiating the achievement of a new protocol, whose duration is 4 years old
