This morning the Committee’s plenary session held a thematic debate on the Common Agricultural Policy reform package with the European Commissioner responsible for agricultural and rural development, Dacian Ciolos. Once again, the Committee’s expertise was much to the fore, with some twenty knowledgeable speakers, many of them farmers, or working on behalf of farming organisations, taking the floor to provide constructive criticism of the Commission’s proposals. And, once again, in Dacian Ciolos the Committee had a knowledgeable and passionate interlocuteur who clearly valued the exchange and was, like Siim Kallas the previous day, determined to give detailed answers as far as he could. This, as Ciolos put it, was the whole point of his presence; to build understanding and support through open and constructive debate. And once again I thought to myself that this was, in effect, the provisions of Article 11 at work.