The Planned Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and Its Effect on the Direct Support Schemein Poland

The planned reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will change the legal framework determining the scope of decisions made by the European Union Member States in the field of the direct payments scheme for farmers. The main goal of this study is to determine to what extent the new legal framework proposed by the European Commission will enable Poland to implement the direct payments scheme in a similar form to the current one. The comparative analysis of the current and planned regulations enabled the identification of equivalents of individual elements of the current direct payments scheme in the new scheme, to indicate differences between them and to assess the significance of these differences. The analysis led to conclusions about the planned reform of the CAP. They concerned the scope of decisions that the Member States could make about the direct payments scheme and the structure of using the funds from the first pillar of the CAP. The analysis showed that the proposed regulations will enable Poland to implement the direct support scheme after 2020 in a very similar form to the one that is used currently. If there are attempts to maintain the status quo, the most important changes enforced by the reform will affect the scheme for small farms and the mechanism of reducing payments.