AGRICULTURE COUNCIL, LUXEMBOURG, 17TH–18TH OCTOBER (Hansard, 19 October 1988)

§ Baroness Trumpington

At this meeting, at which my honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food represented the United Kingdom, the council again discussed the Commission's proposal for an optional scheme of direct income aid to low-income farmers, with a Community contribution towards the cost. The Minister repeated his considerable doubts about the cost-effectiveness and appropriateness of the proposal, and these doubts are now being shared by a number of other members of the council.

The council also discussed for the second time the Commission's proposal for giving effect to the judgment of the European Court about the position of farmers who, because they had taken part in the earlier Community schemes for the abandonment of milk production or conversion of dairy herds, were not assigned a quota for milk production when the quota system was introduced in 1984. The main issues in the debate were the circumstances in which such farmers should now be considered for a milk quota, the conditions to be attached, how the extra quota should be found and how the cost should be offset. The matter is to be considered further, but considerable support was given to the views the Minister has strongly expressed on both occasions that the quotas of existing producers should not be affected and that the conditions for beneficiaries under the judgment need to be restrictively drawn in particular to ensure that any of those clearly intending to go back into milk production should be included and that windfall gains should be excluded.

The Commission gave an oral presentation of their proposals for changes in the support arrangements for beef and for sheep as well as the results of their discussions with the New Zealand Government about future imports of butter and sheepmeat from that country. Members of the Council were only able to give very brief preliminary reactions and these subjects will be taken up at later meetings.

After some discussion the council eventually decided on a reduction in the consumption aid for olive oil to apply during the 1988–89 marketing year, with a saving of 102 million ecu to the CAP budget.

Along with a number of my colleagues in the council the Minister expressed serious doubts about 1245WA the Commission's ideas for detailed implementation of the extensification scheme which particularly in relation to control and verification involves the risk of fraud and other practical difficulties. The Commission undertook to reconsider.

There was also a discussion of the state of the pigmeat market, in which the Minister again expressed the case for the early abolition of monetary compensatory amounts (mcas) in that sector.