European Parliament Approves CAP Reform Amid Strong Opposition

The European Parliament has voted to approve the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the European Union’s mas­sive sub­sidy pro­gram for farm­ers that makes up about one-third of its bud­get.

The agri­cul­tural deal is worth about €387 bil­lion, of which €270 bil­lion will be used for direct pay­ments to farm­ers. Previous iter­a­tions of the CAP have been heav­ily crit­i­cized for giv­ing more sub­si­dies to large farms and agro-indus­trial com­pa­nies.

The new CAP will come into force on January 1, 2023, and expire in 2027.

Along with more fairly allo­cat­ing money to Europe’s 6.5 mil­lion farm­ers, advo­cates for the CAP said that it also pro­motes sus­tain­abil­ity in the agri­cul­tural sec­tor, which is respon­si­ble for more than 10 per­cent of the bloc’s green­house gas emis­sions.

“Farming will be fairer and more sus­tain­able,” said Norbert Lins, who chairs the European Parliament’s agri­cul­ture com­mit­tee, call­ing it the biggest reform since 1992.

Speaking to MEPs in Strasbourg, France, as he wel­comed the reforms, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commissioner for Agriculture said the CAP ​“will fos­ter a sus­tain­able and com­pet­i­tive agri­cul­tural sec­tor that can sup­port the liveli­hoods of farm­ers and pro­vide healthy and sus­tain­able food for soci­ety while deliv­er­ing sig­nif­i­cantly more in terms of envi­ron­ment and cli­mate.”

One of the ways in which the new CAP will help pro­mote sus­tain­abil­ity is by requir­ing that 22 per­cent of pay­ments be spent on ​“eco-schemes,” exam­ples of which include pre­serv­ing bio­di­ver­sity and restor­ing native land­scapes, such as wet­lands. By 2025, this fig­ure is set to rise to 25 per­cent.

Another goal of the ​“eco-schemes” is to reduce the sector’s emis­sions by 10 per­cent.

However, the reforms were not embraced by all E.U. law­mak­ers as some felt that they still are not aligned with the inter­ests of small-scale farm­ers and do not do enough to com­bat cli­mate change.

Martin Häusling, an MEP from the European Green Party, went one step fur­ther and called the reforms are the begin­ning of ​“a dark day for envi­ron­ment pol­icy and E.U. farm­ers.”

His sen­ti­ments were echoed by Michal Wiezik, a Slovak mem­ber of the cen­ter-right European People’s Party, who argued that the real win­ners of the CAP reforms were the ​“oli­garchs.”

“The reform fails to tie into bio­di­ver­sity strate­gies,” he said. ” This reform should’ve been the solu­tion, not a source of the prob­lem.”

• DW News
• Reuters
• European Parliament