CAP in France

Budget

Since 1962, France has been the main ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the Euro­pean bud­get for the CAP. Over the pro­gram­ming peri­od from 2014 to 2020, France will receive 63 bil­lion euros from the EU. Out of these 63 bil­lion, 54 are allo­cat­ed to the first pil­lar, name­ly about 7.1 bil­lion per year. In oth­er words, France allo­cates near­ly 85% of its CAP bud­get to direct pay­ments, to be com­pared with 15% for the sec­ond pillar.

France’s choices for the implementation of the CAP 2015–2020

First pillar

  • 30% for greening
  • 5% for the redis­trib­u­tive pay­ment (up to 52 hectares)
  • 1% for young farm­ers (for the first 34 hectares)
  • 13+2% for vol­un­tary cou­pled sup­port (main­ly for beef and veal, milk, sheep and goat meet; the addi­tion­al 2% for pro­tein crops)
  • 47% for basic payments: 
    • no cap­ping
    • no with­draw­al from the his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences system
    • inter­nal con­ver­gence: grad­ual reduc­tion of the dif­fer­ences in amounts of direct pay­men­t’s enti­tle­ments per hectare by 2020, with no reduc­tion being high­er than 30%.

Second pillar

In 2015, French Regions have become man­ag­ing author­i­ties of the EARFD. The imple­men­ta­tion of the sec­ond pil­lar thus varies from a region to anoth­er. Some mea­sures might be open in a region, but not in the neigh­bour­ing one, and their financ­ing rules also differ.

Over­all, the main expen­di­ture items of the EARFD in France are:

  • areas fac­ing nat­ur­al or oth­er spe­cif­ic constraints
  • con­ver­sion to organ­ic farming
  • agri-envi­ron­ment-cli­mate measures
  • invest­ments
  • set­ting-up aid for young farmers.

 

For a sum­ma­ry of France’s choic­es regard­ing the imple­men­ta­tion of the CAP 2014–2020, you can read the fact­sheet from the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion .

You can also down­load the con­tri­bu­tion of the French gov­ern­ment to the prepa­ra­tion of the future post 2020 CAP.