Joint request by Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania

on additional funding needs in relation to the modulation and new challenges in order to achieve agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy “Health check”

The issues of modulation and the new challenges are one of the major points in the CAP „Health check” discussions. We agree on the necessity to tackle the new challenges. Nevertheless, modulation in the way currently proposed in the draft proposal on direct support schemes is not an appropriate tool to address them.

The current proposal foresees that 100 per cent of the amounts resulting from modulation shall stay in the CAP budget of that Member state.

Therefore, to achieve the objectives of modulation for the sake of today’s objective policy needs such as the new challenges that EU agriculture is facing, we request that provision of additional rural development resources must be applied to the Member States which have a comparatively lower level of direct payments in comparison with the current rural development needs.

There are two possible ways how this could be achieved:

• the resources derived from modulation must be to the largest possible extent redistributed among all Member States according to objective criteria but not the criteria of the first pillar of the CAP

  and/or

• allocation of unused and unspent CAP funds for those Member States, which have a comparatively lower level of direct payments.

We expect that the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Presidency will mobilize all possible efforts and resources to this effect.