Adevărul notes that “Romania, like its counterparts from the East, will receive more funding in the fiscal period 2014-2020. The new reform benefits these states, which will gain 30 percent more in subsidies, to the detriment of the countries of western Europe.”

The main changes made ​​to the CAP budget [55 billion euros per year, or 40 percent of the total EU budget] consist of simplifying individual payments, helping young farmers start up, and making the CAP simpler and more streamlined. The goal: to allow farmers to be more flexible and adapt better to markets.

Moreover, the Romanian daily continues, “the aid to large operators will be capped, grants will be given out based on the acreage actually farmed and not in terms of the total acreage or its production capacity. The budget for innovation and research will be doubled. Moreover, 30 percent of direct aid granted by the EU will be linked to measures to protect the environment,” writes Adevărul.

If Romania, which has the largest number of farms in the EU (32 percent of the EU total) welcomes this reform, the large landowners of Britain and Spain have something to worry about.

"The EU will cap aid to ‘sofa farmers’,” leads Público. The Madrid daily notes that the Commission has initiated “a special crusade to revolutionise agricultural subsidies.” In its view, the most novel element of the proposal is to control the subsidies to large landowners and farms whose owners do not engage in agriculture as their main activity. “This will directly affect the big landowners like the Queen of England or [Prince] Albert of Monaco, and in Spain, the symbolic case of the Duchess of Alba”, the newspaper writes.

The idea of ​​a system of social solidarity to redistribute agricultural surpluses as food aid to the poor was brought in (in the winter of 1986-87) by Jacques Delors, then President of the European Commission. (...) But in the last ten years, food surpluses have fallen. The contributions that had come from surpluses were then replaced by direct financial contributions to charities. One percent of CAP financing – that is, 500 million euros – was to finance the European Programme of Food Aid to the Most Deprived Persons (PEAD). Some countries, like Germany and Sweden, turned to the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), arguing that this amount was purely social assistance unrelated to the CAP.

On April 12 the Court agreed with them by annulling the right to award a portion of the CAP budget for food distribution through charities. The Commission has not appealed. According to the latest study of the impact of the PEAD, more than 13 million people in Europe benefited from the programme in 2006, a year in which the number of people at risk of food poverty was estimated at 43 million in the EU of twenty-five states.

To save the dairy sector we need to consume its produce, declared European agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel, before castigating consumers for lapping up “Coca-Cola, which costs between €1 and €1.26 a litre” – a lot more than milk. “An argument […] that betrays a certain perplexity all the same,” opines the Belgian daily.