An assessment of EU grain policy instruments conducted at the request of the European Commission has just been published.  One key point is the conclusion on the overall efficiency of the Common Market Organisation (CMO) system for regulating grain markets.  Yet despite this, there is a call for serious reconsideration of the CMO, mainly because of the surge in levels of grain in public stocks in a number of New Member States.
 
AGPB, AGPM and FFCAT have criticised these conclusions as incoherent.

While it is clear that there are abnormally high levels of public grain stocks in a number of Eastern European countries, the phenomenon is not caused by the CMO;  as the assessment itself points out, it is because of:
 
- the lack of adequate and efficient infrastructures (e.g. transport) needed for harvests in these countries to be sold efficiently
- the exemption from compulsory set-aside granted as a provisional measure to these same countries.
 
AGPB, AGPM and FFCAT therefore refute the idea that the implementation of intervention measures should be restricted to bread wheat and areas of Europe where there is a grain shortage.  They are also opposed to the recommendation that intervention should be managed through private storage mechanisms;  if this were required continuously for a number of years, the mechanisms would collapse through lack of finance.
 
AGPB, AGPM and FFCAT cannot agree to a report that gives a positive assessment of EU grain market mechanisms being used as a pretext for another review of the justification of the CMO for grain, and at a time when the previous reform has only just been implemented and will not have a full impact on the New Member States until 2008.
 
Contacts : 
AGPB, Pascal Hurbault, 01 44 31 16 25
AGPM, Claude Lacadée, 06 80 31 62 27
FFCAT, Yves Boulay, 01 53 00 90 00