EUにおける困窮者向け食料支援プログラムの改革について

Abstract

The Food Distribution Programme for the Most Deprived Persons in the European Union (MDP), which enables the surplus intervention stocks of agricultural products to be distributed to the deprived in member states, has been in place since 1987 as an instrument of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The primary purpose of the MDP is to stabilize an agricultural market by reduction in the intervention stocks and the appendant one is to help people in need. The current MDP was decided to end in 2013 but the reformed MDP is scheduled to take place since 2014 (the detail is not dealt with in the article). The aim of the article is at the introduction of co-financing to the MDP, which has been one of the contentious policy tools during the argument on how the MDP should be reformed. Co-financing means burden sharing between the EU and a member state on the implementation cost of an EU policy. Its introduction facilitates the increase in size of financial resources for the MDP, compared to the current system under the principle of financial solidarity where the EU bears the entire cost. Section 1 shows that the MDP, despite a part of the CAP, has functioned as a de facto social policy since its beginning. Section 2, describing two turning points of the MDP, i.e. the start of distribution of purchased food in 1996 and the judgment of the General Court in 2011 upholding a complaint by Germany to annul a regulation concerning the MDP, explains the process where both of them, together with CAP reforms after 1992, terminated it. After the judgment, some member states requested its reform for continuation because of its social significance. Focusing on reform plans of the MDP, especially the introduction of co-financing recommended by the European Court of Auditors and the European Commission, section 3, in consideration of two different impacts of its introduction not only on people in need but on the financial responsibility of a member state, concludes that its introduction brings the improvement of accessibility of the deprived to the aid of the MDP, accompanied by a situation where a member state with more people in need assumes heavier financial responsibility for the implementation of the MDP.