EU Reflection Group Urges Overhaul of Ag Sector

Politico’s Paula Andrés reported Wednesday that “business as usual is no longer an option for European farmers and businesses if climate collapse and economic hardship are to be avoided.”

“That’s the top line of a joint report presented to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, the result of seven months of intense negotiations among 29 organizations with a stake in, and often opposing views on, the agri-food sector,” Andrés reported. “Von der Leyen convened the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture, which produced the report, earlier this year in a bid to address farmer outrage over low incomes and growing environmental regulation before the June EU election. Her call was followed by some quick-and-dirty concessions to farm lobbies that angered environmental NGOs and progressive lawmakers.”

“‘We must [and] we will do more to protect our farmers and to make the agrifood system more resilient, more competitive — but most importantly also more sustainable,’ von der Leyen told reporters as she accepted the report from Peter Strohschneider, a German academic who moderated the roundtable,” Andrés reported. “Von der Leyen wants to weave the results of the dialogue into her own vision on the future of EU agriculture. Her priorities, she said, included ‘fair and sufficient incomes to farmers, an agriculture that works for nature and with nature … [and] a system that works with incentives.‘”

EuroNews’ Robert Hodgson reported on Wednesday that “green groups have hailed the outcome of gruelling talks over the future of agriculture in the EU as broad acceptance, even from the industrial farming lobby, of the need for a fundamental transformation of food production in Europe after six decades of the Common Agricultural Policy.”

“‘This agreement is not just a milestone, but hopefully a game-changer,’ said Ariel Brunner, director of BirdLife Europe, one of the environmental groups that took part in the talks,” Hodgson reported. “‘After months of intense negotiations, we’ve finally reached a turning point where, despite the differing interests and politics, there’s a collective recognition that the status quo simply isn’t an option.'”

“Briefing journalists as the report was published, Brunner said the agreement should signal a return to ‘normal politics’ after sometimes violent protests that forced European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to backtrack on aspects of the Green Deal, withdrawing a proposal to halve pesticide use and easing environmental controls,” Hodgson reported.

Report Urges Farm Subsidy Overhaul

One of the most significant proposed changes laid out in the report, according to reporting from the Financial Times’ Alice Hancock is that “the EU should undertake a major overhaul of its €387bn Common Agricultural Policy to subsidise farmers based on their income rather than the size of their farms.”

“The most significant recommendation is a major overhaul of the EU’s CAP subsidy scheme, which was first launched in 1962 and consumes a third of the bloc’s multiannual budget,” Hancock reported. “Instead of allocating direct support to farmers according to the amount of land they own and linking that to mandatory environmental standards, the report recommends that subsidies should go to ‘the active farmers who need it most’ based on their ‘economic viability.'”

Report Also Urges Less Meat Consumption

The report also said that “Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognised the need to eat less meat after hammering out a shared vision for the future of agriculture with green groups and other stakeholders,” according to reporting from the Guardian’s Ajit Niranjan. “The wide-ranging report calls for ‘urgent, ambitious and feasible’ change in farm and food systems and acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than scientists recommend. It says support is needed to rebalance diets toward plant-based proteins such as better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock.”

“The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who commissioned the report to quell furious farmer protests at the start of the year, said the results would feed into a planned vision for agriculture that she will present in the first 100 days of her new mandate,” Niranjan reported. “‘We share the same goal,’ said Von der Leyen. ‘Only if farmers can live off their land will they invest in more sustainable practices. And only if we achieve our climate and environmental goals together will farmers be able to continue making a living.'”