Europe’s agriculture commissioner is confident he can prevent a new batch of slipper farmers being created in Scotland.
But Dacian Ciolos also conceded yesterday there remains a lot of work to be done by the European Commission and Scottish and UK governments to ensure the door on landowners receiving farm payments for doing nothing in return is firmly closed.
He delivered a commitment on the opening day of the Oxford Farming Conference yesterday to work to resolve the problem in response to direct criticism from Drew Sloan, the Scottish Government’s chief agricultural officer.
Mr Sloan told him the commission was, as the Cap reform process progressed, making it ever more difficult to close the loopholes which allow slipper farmers to currently receive tens of millions of pounds of aid annually on agriculturally unproductive land in the Highlands and islands. Cap reforms threaten to create scores more slipper farmers from 2015 as they potentially open up a further 3-4million acres of currently unclaimed unproductive moorland, hillsides and uplands for area-based support.
The Scottish Government fought for – and won – an activity clause in the reform package. But its preferred minimum livestock stocking density qualifier is unlikely to meet World Trade Organisation rules.
Mr Sloan told Mr Ciolos that an agricultural activity demand was absolutely essential as a qualifier for direct aid payments if slipper farming is to be eliminated. “But the delegated acts being developed by the commission (as the reform deal is turned into legal text) are making it more difficult for us to do that.”
Irish farm minister Simon Coveney, who secured the Cap reform package in June during his presidency of the European Agriculture Council, said subsidies should be used to deliver food production. Flexibility was needed to deal with the Scottish situation.
NFU England president Peter Kendall said he loathed any further complications in the reform package, adding the last thing he wanted was for the Rural Payments Agency to have to check with the Inland Revenue the legitimacy of any subsidy claim.
Mr Ciolos insisted the flexibility had been given to member states to deal with specific issues in their own countries – and that applied in equal measure to Scotland. He told Mr Sloan that, despite the constraints, the problem can be solved. “I am sure you can find a solution in the framework.”
Speaking later to the Press and Journal, Mr Ciolos said there were measures available to both Scotland and the UK.
But he accepted that while they “might not solve all the problem, they would deal with a big part of it”.
“We are working on this. We are aware of the problem. It’s not solved totally yet. We cannot recouple support to have elements of production in it. This was the request of Scotland to have a minimum stocking activity,” he added.
Mr Ciolos said by working together there would be a resolution, but he pointed to the unique nature of it as no other European nation had the slipper farmer problem that Scotland has. “I cannot change all the European rules because of that. But we can use several of the instruments we have available to get payments correct.”