Publications Archive

The food supply chain comprises agricultural enterprises producing commodities, commodity exchange traders, food processing companies, (producers) and food retailers. The Commission criticises the lacking “resilience“ to boosting commodity prices (“shocks in agricultural prices“).It deems a “better functioning food supply chain“ as “urgently“ needed to avoid an “escalation“ in prices as the economic recovery sets in. In its Communication it presents measures to achieve these objectives. Amongst other things, it intends to prepare sets of standard contracts, whose use would be voluntary for the market players.

The Commission promotes the expansion of the EU internal energy market and announces a legal framework for the safe storage of nuclear waste. The expansion of EU energy grids is to be better coordinated. The Commission wishes to promote technological innovation and initiate a shift towards a low-carbon energy system by 2020 through market-based instruments.

The Commission intends to promote the use of public private partnerships in order to mobilise private funds for public investment projects. To this end, it wishes to remove obstacles to the implementation of PPPs in Member States and the EU and to support PPPs through EU funding.

Following the failure of its last Amendment Proposal, the Commission is again planning a review of the Working Time Directive. Based on a questionnaire, the Commission intends to undertake a full-scale consultation of the social partners (workers and employers associations) at European level, in order to clarify whether the social partners also consider a review of the Working Time Directive to be necessary and, if so, what such a review could look like.
The key issues are the rules on the maximum working time, dealing with on-call time, determining rest periods and calculating the average weekly working time.

Member States have agreed to improve the coordination of their employment policies, in the scope of the Europe 2020 strategy. To this end, the Commission presented to the Council guidelines for employment policies outlining the direction which educational, labour and social policies of Member States should take. The headline targets of the guidelines are identical to those proposed to the European Council within the context of the Europe 2020 strategy.

Since the onset of the financial crisis the EU Financial Market Supervision, which is still very nationally-oriented, is up for discussion. Now, the Commission proposes that the ESRB is to monitor the stability of the entire European financial system. Moreover, three European Supervisory Authorities are to ensure an improved prudential supervision of single financial institutions.

The Commission is planning to increase Europeana’s collection by 10 million objects by 2010. To this end, it calls Member States to contribute to a “sustained digitisation“.

Without financial support for developing countries, it is likely that no global climate agreement will be reached. The Commission presents criteria for how these payments should be distributed among developed countries. Further the Commission discusses whether the share of the EU should be financed through the EU budget, a common EU climate fund or using the budgets of Member States.

According to the Commission climate change requires adaptation measures in key policy sectors such as health and social affairs, agriculture and infrastructure. In order to supplement the expenses of Member States and to share burdens, adaptation measures could be financed through EU spending programmes.

Since the onset of the financial crisis the EU Financial Market Supervision, which is still very nationally-oriented, is up for discussion. Now, the Commission proposes the establishment of three European supervisory authorities (ESA) which are to ensure an improved prudential supervision of banks, insurances and investment firms.