Member States
Collectively, the member states are the most influential actor in CAP reform. The European Commission adapts its legislative proposals to what it believes the member states will accept. And the European Parliament, regardless of its formal powers, finds it difficult to obtain significant changes once an agreement between the member states has been secured.
That makes it tremendously important to lobby governments within each member state. The challenge is to soften the positions of those governments that resist fundamental CAP reform and to make supportive governments commit to resolutely defend their positions in Brussels. Generally, a promising strategy is to broaden the debate beyond agriculture by pointing to the manifold stakes at play and by involving different stakeholders. If necessary, the voice of environmental NGOs and the environment ministry, of the business community and the finance ministry have to be harnessed against an agriculture ministry under the sway of the farm lobby.
A striking case in point is Germany, which helped minimizing the 2008/09 Health Check reform of the CAP. This was everything but a natural position dictated by national interests. After all, Germany is the major net contributor to the EU budget, it is strongly dependent on a liberal world trading system that is constantly undermined by agricultural protectionism, and the deep-rooted ideals of a social market economy run counter to the current CAP. The German position paper and Franco-German position paper on the post-2013 CAP again revealed a striking status quo bias.
The dominating line of argument will have to refer to our common interest in effective EU policies. But the balance of each country's contribution to, and receipts from, the EU budget also needs to be addressed. Being a substantial contributor to the EU budget, France may lose its interest in EU-funded blanket subsidies if their distribution is no longer slanted in their favor but spread out more equally across Europe. Other countries – notably Spain, Finland, Portugal and Austria – are reluctant to support reform though they could expect much higher CAP payments if those were targeted at public goods.
The Eastern European member states would certainly win from an EU flat rate subsidy in agriculture (or any other distribution along the lines of the Warsaw Declaration). But they will be much better off by shifting the money from the CAP to the EU’s structural and cohesion funds. These funds are already much more targeted at the poorest member states.
After 2013, the structural funds will be redistributed. Consultations by the European Commission have made it clear that many stakeholders want to abolish EU payments to poor regions in wealthy member states, keeping only an inter-state transfer mechanism to the benefit of the poorest member states. Poor regions in countries like Germany or the UK would then be supported directly by rich regions in the same country, without the detour via Brussels. And even among those stakeholders who wish to maintain the possibility of tapping EU structural funds for all regions, most agree that these funds should be more strongly focused on less-developed member states and regions.
Reform of the CAP and the structural funds are linked. If the new member states support a rational reform of the CAP towards spending less but better on agriculture, this dynamic is likely to spill over to reform of the structural funds. Such a rational reform of the structural funds would mean ending the inefficient web of cross-subsidies characteristic of current structural and cohesion policies and focusing European solidarity transfers on poor (Eastern European) member states.
In sum, many reform-averse governments are not defending national interests, but serving their farm lobby. Stakeholders can thus win societal support for reform and press their governments to deliver at EU-level.