Agricultural market regime
Market regulations for agricultural products are a central instrument of the agricultural policy of the European Union (EU) for the common agricultural market. Market orders are for just about any agricultural product of grain on wine , sugar to bananas adopted EU regulations .
The main function of market regulations is to delimit the EU internal market from the world market with its sometimes much lower prices. The prices for imported agricultural products are kept artificially high within the EU in order to protect domestic producers from competition from non-EU countries.
In order to be able to do justice to their task, the market regulations provide as control elements, among other things, levies, export premiums (export refunds) and import quotas .
Within the framework of the WTO , changes to the market organization are being negotiated in repeated rounds.
Levies
Levies are import duties that are levied on the import of agricultural products with market regulations. The purpose of the levies is to raise the price of the goods from the low world market level to the level of the price on the EU internal market. Levies are not customs duties, but are levied by the customs authorities when the goods are imported into free circulation. They are relevant for calculating the customs value and import sales tax . The amount of the levy roughly corresponds to the difference between the world market price and the domestic price in the EU.
In some cases, levies are linked to certain quotas and staggered according to these. Imports of goods that are within the first quota (e.g. the first x tonnes of bananas which will be imported in one year) are subject to a low levy, goods that are within the next quota (e.g. more than x tonnes Bananas, but not yet y tonnes of bananas) are subject to a higher levy and all imports in excess of these quotas are subject to the full levy. This is regulated in the banana market regulation, for example , which means that on the first working day of each year huge quantities of bananas are declared for customs clearance and the quota is already exhausted at the very beginning of the year. The banana market regime was introduced in 1993 to protect banana cultivation in the Canary Islands and the French overseas territories against more competitive imports from South America .
Export premiums / export refunds
| Agricultural product | 1978 | 2001 |
|---|---|---|
| Grain | 84% | 129% |
| Potatoes | 94% | 108% |
| sugar | 129% | 136% |
| Beef and veal | 100% | 166% |
| pork meat | 88% | 88% |
| Poultry meat | 58% | 64% |
| Eggs | 79% | 75% |
| cheese | 90% | 107% |
| butter | 135% | 79% |
| Source: Federal Government Report | ||
Export subsidies were paid to the exporter for the export of agricultural products (including processed products such as baked goods) from the EU, so that agricultural products from the EU could be competitive on the world market. The amount of the export subsidy corresponded roughly to the difference between the internal price in the EU and the world market price. In the case of agricultural products that have been produced too much in the EU (e.g. milk lake or butter mountain in the 80s), the reimbursements were partly higher in order to make exporting these goods even more interesting financially. In the meantime, however, the financial incentive systems have been rearranged in such a way that such overproduction no longer occurs.
An exception is durum wheat , the price of which is higher in the EU than on the world market, since durum wheat is a very popular product as the basis of pasta . There are no export subsidies here and at times even export taxes (opposing levies) were levied in order to keep the price of the goods at a high level.