Intervention to fall
Intervention to fall
INTERVENTION prices for cereals will be trimmed further in 2001, after a decision to cut the monthly increments paid by Brussels.
EU farm ministers meeting on July 17 rejected a commission proposal to start the cuts this year, which would have saved the budget k8m (£5m). As such, grain intervention will open in November at k111.25/t (£70/t) and climb by k1/t each month after that.
But for the 2001/02 marketing year it was decided to limit the monthly increment to k0.93/t a month. This means intervention will start the season at k101.31/t (£64/t) and end it in May 2002 at k107.82/t (£68/t).
Apart from this, the price package agreed by the farm council was effectively a roll-over from last year, apart from the reforms for beef and arable farmers already enshrined in Agenda 2000.
Farm commissioner, Franz Fischler, said he was pleased that the old days of using the annual price fixing as an excuse for ministers to go subsidy hunting in Brussels were a thing of the past. *