A deal brokered in Brussels yesterday on 2015 EU budget is set to leave the CAP crisis reserve of €433 million intact.
The news comes despite earlier drafts of the Budget suggesting the crisis reserve fund would be raided to pay for support measures compensating farmers for losses due to the Russian Ban.
Farm organisations across the EU, including the IFA, had said the Russian trade ban was direct consequence of decisions taken by European leaders in a geopolitical dispute and said it was never envisioned that the CAP Crisis Reserve fund would be used to deal with market disturbances of this kind.
Earlier this year the European Commission announced it was to trigger a cut in direct payments to farmers for the 2014 claim year of around 1.30% to establish the agricultural crisis reserve for next year. It was also announced that there will be a threshold to exempt the first €2,000 of farmers’ direct aid payments from the cut.
Meanwhile, European Commission announced recently that it is set to reimburse Irish farmers to the tune of €27,196,811, reinstating monies previously taken as part of the crisis reserve as it was unspent in 2014.
The Department of Agriculture said this week that it is now putting procedures in place to re-imburse farmers €27.1 million in CAP monies early 2015.
Minister Coveney said that given the level of payments to farmers, it would not have been appropriate to delay the issue of the balancing payments to incorporate the re-imbursement.
He said the Department is now putting procedures in place to issue the Financial Discipline re-imbursement to farmers early in 2015.
Some €868 million of EU CAP money is to be reimbursed to farmers Europe wide, following a regulation adopted by the Commission.