On 26 June 2003, EU farm ministers adopted a fundamental reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and introduced a new Single Payment Scheme (or Single Farm Payment, SPS) for direct subsidy payments to landowners.
The system of subsidy applies throughout the European Union according to rules agreed between the member states. However, exact details of implementation and grants vary from country to country within the outline rules. Transitional rules also apply for new member states which joined the EU in 2004 and more recently. States have a choice of whether to introduce the new scheme at once, or to phase it in over a period from 2005–2013. The UK Government decided to be one of the first countries in Europe to introduce the Single Payment Scheme and decided to start to phase it in from 2005. Introduction in the UK was strategically coordinated via DEFRA, with devolved responsibility to England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to independently implement the scheme.
The new scheme was intended to change the way the EU supported its farm sector by removing the link between subsidies and production of specific crops. This reform focused on consumers and taxpayers, while giving farmers the freedom to produce what the market wanted. Member States have the choice to maintain a limited link between subsidy and production to avoid abandonment of particular production. Current payments to farmers continue to reflect historic patterns of production for different crops in countries where the scheme has yet to be introduced, or as a proportion of the total payment where the scheme is being introduced over a period of years.
The Single Farm Payment is linked to meeting environmental, public, animal and plant health and animal welfare standards and the need to keep land in good agricultural and environmental condition.
Read more about Single Payment Scheme: History, Scheme Details, Future, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words single, payment and/or scheme:
“Everything was there,
Every single thing
Waiting was to bring,
Clear from hydrogen
All the way to men.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority in exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)