| African, Caribbean and Pacific countries
| | The ACP Group consists of 79 Member States: 48 countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, 16 from the Caribbean and 15 from the Pacific. Fixed quantities of ACP sugar command preferential prices under the terms of the Sugar Protocol.
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| Bioethanol | | A petrol additive or substitute produced from crops such as cereals, sugar cane, sugar beet and fodder beet.
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| Biomass | | Any biological mass derived from plant or animal matter (e.g. timber crops, straw, chicken litter and other waste material) used as a source of renewable heat or electricity.
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| Decoupling | | Breaking the link between support and the production activity: a payment is said to be 'partially decoupled' if a proportion of the support is still based on production.
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| Degressive payment | | A payment that decreases in a stepwise fashion.
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| Environmental Stewardship |
| Environmental Stewardship is a new agri-environment scheme which provides funding to farmers and other land managers in England who deliver effective environmental management on their land.
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| Everything But Arms | | EBA is an EU initiative, dating from 2001, to allow duty free and quota free entry for products from 48 (now 50) least developed countries in the world (for sugar, this liberalisation will be phased-in over three years from 2006/07 to 2008/09).
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| Export refunds | | Payments to exporters of goods from the EU to third countries in order to compensate for the difference between high Community and lower world prices.
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| Flat-rate payments | | Equal payments per hectare resulting from the total direct support allocation for a country being spread evenly across all the eligible area.
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| Flexibility clause | | An element of the sugar reform proposals that would grant sugar beet growers and processors the possibility to negotiate the sugar beet price down to 10% below the guaranteed minimum price.
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| Import tariffs | | Taxes levied by a government on goods imported into its country.
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| Intervention system | | Market management tool in which products are bought by the EU or a national government when prices are low and supplies high, and sold when prices have increased and supplies reduced. The 'intervention price' is the level at which the public authorities have a support buying commitment. This facility is, however, scarcely ever used within the sugar regime.
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| Least Developed Countries |
| A social/economic classification status applied by the United Nations to around 50 of the poorest countries of the world.
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| Minimum beet price | | The price which processors are legally required to pay growers for their sugar beet.
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| Private storage system | |
Mechanism for temporarily withdrawing sugar from the market, triggered when the market price falls below the reference price.
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| Production levy | | A levy charged on the beet industry (processors and sugar beet growers combined) to meet the full costs to the EU budget, on an annual basis, of exporting surplus sugar to the world market.
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| Quotas | | Supply constraints, based on historic production references, devised as a means of limiting EU responsibility for supporting sugar.
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| Reduction coefficient | |
A numerical factor, based on the proportions of 'B' quota, that is currently used to allocate quota cuts amongst the EU Member States.
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| Reference price | | Institutional price establishing the trigger level for private storage.
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| Restructuring scheme | |
Element of the Commission's reform proposals, designed to lure inefficient sugar processors out of production and compensate for the closure of factories.
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| Single Farm Payment | | Single subsidy payment amalgamating a number of existing direct subsidy schemes, introduced as part of the package of CAP reforms agreed in June 2003.
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| Special Committee on Agriculture |
| Group comprising permanent representatives of all the EU Member States, which meets to prepare Council decisions on common agricultural policy matters.
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| Transitional hybrid compensation system |
| Model adopted by Defra in implementing the Single Farm Payment in England that combines a large element of historically based payments in the early years, but moves, over time, to a fully flat-rate area payment.
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| World Trade Organisation | |
An intergovernmental body set up to administer multilateral trade agreements, negotiations on which are ongoing under a round begun at a meeting in Doha, Qatar.
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