Brussels, June 12 - Europe's importers and exporters of key farm commodities like cereals, sugar and meat should soon have an easier life as EU regulators strip away some of the red tape enveloping their day-to-day business operations.
As part of its drive to simplify the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), many of the licences required for commodity import and export will be abolished, or at least brought into line with a single set of rules, the European Commission said on Thursday. EU licences are now needed to import around 500 commodity products, a number that will be cut to 65 as of July 1. For cereals, for example, the number of products for which an import licence is required will be reduced from 133 to 21, it said.
From August, wine traders will be allowed to import any wine product permitted under EU regulations without a licence. At the moment, around 100 wine products must have import licences.
For exports, only 43 products will have to be accompanied by a licence. Export certificates for cereals will apply for just nine products, compared with 133 products now.
The EU licensing obligation would also be abolished for imports paid at full duty in the beef, veal and dairy sectors. But licences would continue to apply to some products imported under preferential trade terms, the Commission said.
"Operators will no longer have to apply for licences and deposit costly securities, and national authorities will no longer need to process them, thereby saving time and reducing costs," the Commission said in a statement.
"Many traders, importers and exporters will no longer need to apply for and subsequently manage licences at all -- those that do so will have fewer licences to deal with," it said.
Using licences allowed the Commission to carry out detailed monitoring of trade in often sensitive product areas and made it easier to anticipate trade developments.
Licences also allowed EU regulators to manage farm trade measures such as tariff quotas and export refunds, the statement said.
Last year, EU ministers agreed to strip dozens of layers of red tape from the CAP to simplify the lives of farmers producing everything from poultry, eggs and cereals to potatoes.
Much of EU bureaucracy was sliced through, with around 40 different regulations covering 21 commodity policy areas being replaced with just one framework law.