New Investment Iniative for Young Farmers; Finland Visit; EP appearance - Main contents

The past few days have been action packed. The launch of a €20bn Memorandum of Understanding with the European Investment Bank, two appearances in the European Parliament and a country visit to Finland have been amongst the activities since my last update.

The past few days have been action packed. The launch of a €20bn Memorandum of Understanding with the European Investment Bank, two appearances in the European Parliament and a country visit to Finland have been amongst the activities since my last update.

On Monday, alongside EIB Vice President Molterer, I unveiled a plan to use the Rural Development Fund to leverage €20bn of new investment in the rural economy across the EU. Such investment should help modernise and restructure the farm sector, help young farmers in particular get set up with modern new equipment and provide a boost to the rural economy as a whole, with measures beyond the farm gate such as investment in agri-tourism. The initiative works by using RDP guarantees to crowd in cheap, long term finance to provide for the investment needs of the rural sector, which is suffering from an investment gap. Initial evidence is that this plan already works in some member states who have piloted it. For example, between 2010 and 2014 a guarantee fund which operated in Romania and was funded through rural development policy helped to make EUR 426 million of loans available by providing just EUR 116 million as security. That's more than three-and-a-half euros of credit for every single euro provided from the fund. By November 2014, 740 projects from around 700 beneficiaries had been supported - creating or maintaining more than 10 000 jobs.

Thursday of last week I travelled with my team to Finland to meet with Minister for Agriculture, Petteri Orpo, as well as with the Agriculture Committee of the Finnish Parliament. I have said it before and will say it again, I take particular interest in reaching out to national parliamentarians. I also had a good meeting with Finnish agriculture stakeholders. It is clear that permanent pasture is an issue in Finland in terms of implementing the new CAP, so I have asked my services to come up with a pragmatic solution to address this issue.

Dermot Ryan and Tom Tynan travelled up to Lapland to represent me. There they met reindeer farmers, foresters and saw at first hand the wonderful diversity of European agriculture in the Arctic Circle. They even met one of the most famous beneficiaries of the CAP - Santa Claus! His village is co-financed by the RDP as an agri-tourism measure - bringing visitors, economic activity and thus jobs to a geographically isolated rural area. EU value added in action.

On Tuesday I attended the European Parliament twice - in the morning to give an update to MEPs on the Agriculture Committee on my simplification agenda. I thanked the MEPs for their contributions (110 pages out of 580 in total). I outlined three areas where we can make progress in the coming months: greening implementation, market measures and reporting. I outlined the challenge of simplifying implementation in the context of not re-opening the Basic Act.

In the afternoon, I returned to the European Parliament to speak in the hearing organised by the Budgetary Control Committee on the draft Own Initiative Report by Petri Sarvamaa MEP on performance-based controls in the CAP.

Yesterday was spent in a series of meetings with officials and outside groups as I plan for the week ahead. Today I will travel to Northern Ireland to meet with senior politicians and stakeholders there and after that I will be in Luxembourg on Monday for a country visit. The big date on the calendar next week is the end of the milk quota regime at midnight on 31st - the end of an era in European agriculture and the beginning of a new one.

Of course there was terrible tragedy this week, with the crash of Germanwings flight U49525 with the loss of all passengers and crew. My sincerest condolences go out to the families of all the victims.