Agriculture Directorate-General

A restructuring of the responsibilities of the deputy directors-general in the Agriculture Directorate-General is under discussion.

Quite a few Member States have expressed similar views at working party meetings chaired by the Agriculture Directorate-General.

Terence Leslie William WINDLE, lately Director, Agriculture Directorate-General, E.G. Commission, Brussels.

This analysis was also supplemented in the communication on the mid-term review by medium-term prognoses for agricultural markets and reports on the rice, nut and milk sectors, which were published by the Agriculture Directorate-General in June.

Work is currently in progress, under the aegis of the Agriculture Directorate-General, on comprehensive analyses of the potential effects of the actual policy proposals, the results of which will be presented at the end of the year along with the draft legislation.

A task force, set up by OLAF and the Agriculture Directorate-General, is now at work dealing with the issue, mentioned by Mr McCartin, of what one may term the claims backlogs in the area of agricultural policy.

On the coexistence issue, the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies is carrying out a study entitled 'Scenarios for Coexistence of Genetically Modified, Conventional and Organic Crops in European Agriculture', commissioned by the Agriculture Directorate-General and coordinated by the Joint Research Centre.

Commissioner, nobody will now expect the Agriculture Directorate-General to turn itself into an equal opportunities office for women - that would surely be to ask too much of it - but the programmes can of course include priorities that also take women into account, and I acknowledge that the Commission is already doing something about this.