Proponents of a greener farm policy have raised the stakes in the CAP debate

The CAP is under assault. But not from the traditional army of budget disciplinarians, aiming their scythes at the farm budget. Instead, the new assailants are wearing green and are carrying pots of gold. However, attached to their shining treasure are a multitude of strings, and a radically different logic for subsidising EU farmers.

Over recent weeks and months, a flurry of reports have emerged in favour of an eco-oriented CAP.

Last week the European Parliament heard French MEP Stephane Le Foll set out his vision for a food and environment policy to supplant agricultural policy, alongside the release of a joint report from environmental NGO Birdlife and the European Landowners Organisation (ELO) calling for an eco-centric CAP. These followed the release of December’s RISE foundation report, arguing for an environmental market-based CAP.

The movement is by no means confined to this curious marriage of landowners, conservationists and left-wing MEPs. Perhaps the most crucial new addition to the CAP debate came in the form of last week’s report from the Institute for European Environmental Policy, calling for the CAP to deliver more ecosystem services in line with society’s demands. The study was paid for and ordered by the European Commission.

Green view coming into focus

A basic logic has been outlined: the current CAP is not delivering sufficient ‘public goods’, and as a policy impacting directly on the bulk of European private land, it must be re-centred on the provision of eco-system services, and must be budgeted accordingly.

The public goods in question are listed as biodiversity protection, climate change mitigation, soil carbon sequestration, landscape preservation and much more.

The most radical version of the argument calls for CAP payments to lock farmers into a contract requiring the delivery of public goods in given quantities. Under these scenarios, an environmental marketplace – balancing society’s demand for public goods against their supply from the farming sector – would define CAP support levels and put a concrete price on farmland nature protection and climate change mitigation.

It is acknowledged in some quarters that the number coming out the other end of the calculation could be huge.

Others call for a clear shift from agricultural policy to a ‘food and environment’ policy. But here too the change would be more than symbolic: tougher environmental obligations would be attached to all farm payments, and would no longer remain an add-on for optional schemes in the CAP’s 2nd pillar. 

Despite variations in the small-print, momentum is clearly gathering for a ‘good CAP’ with a new green logic and a new subsidy structure, to strike a final death blow to the era of unaccountable ‘bad CAP’ subsidies and market support. With three years to go until the EU revamps its budget, a body of work is already coming together to anchor the environmental view.

Food security, the biggest public good?

However, major doubts remain over the viability of a radical agri-environmental approach to the CAP. The question essentially hinges on whether food security – the founding and recently revalued raison d’être of the CAP – is in fact considered as a public good.

Many would argue that securing adequate food production to feed the world is the biggest public good of them all, and is also in perennial under-supply given continued and worsening global hunger problems. 

Even in the EU context, continuing price volatility on agricultural markets has shown that producing food and making a living from it cannot be taken for granted. Furthermore, farm lobbies have warned that attaching any fresh demands to CAP subsidies could bury them in costly red tape, putting them at a major disadvantage vis-à-vis their international competitors.

This puts the environmental shoe on the other foot, leaving the EU vulnerable to charges of ‘carbon leakage’, as emissions are effectively outsourced to less stringently-regulated countries from where our food imports are increasingly derived.

While the case may sometimes be overstated, these arguments help to emphasise the international dimension, and the need to see EU food production within the context of global supply and global demand.

No food security without long-term ‘resource base’

Last week’s Commission-ordered report does acknowledge that food security is a crucial public good, but puts general faith in the market to trigger the right supply responses.

Public policy should instead be focused on producing long-term outcomes which safeguard food and environmental security, it was explained. The CAP should thus revolve around “the maintenance of a sustainable resource base, including safeguarding water supplies, managing the land to improve its resilience to flooding, maintaining soil fertility, and safeguarding the integrity and resilience of ecosystems”.

But what are the short-term implications of pursuing these objectives? Would farmland become a de facto nature reserve where city slickers come to marvel at the great bustard in flight, while crops and livestock steadily disappear?

The jury is still out on whether pursuing long-term environmental security (and by extension long-term food security) means limiting production today. A ‘climate change first’ agenda would almost certainly impose some constraints on food production: for example by putting carbon sequestering forests out of bounds when attempts are made to activate new agricultural land for upping production. Whether higher yields on existing land can make up the difference (and without entailing their own forms of environmental damage) remains the subject of heated scientific disagreement.

Does the public want public goods?

The argument is really only beginning, and the pendulum could conceivably swing either way in the run-up to the budget reforms. The public goods argument could fall flat if its supposed protagonist – the public – defies the assumption that it demands and is willing to pay for these ecosystem services.

However, there are other reasons to believe that the idea could take hold. Not least the possibility that farmers could start pushing the idea themselves. 

For various reasons – many to do with general EU-scepticism – there is already major public resistance to what the CAP costs. In order to justify a parallel or bigger budget in the future, a radical rebranding of farm policy may be needed.

Cometh the hour, cometh the issue: climate change. A CAP that shows itself to be taking the climate initiative and addressing dual objectives as fundamental as food and environmental security (in whatever eventual configuration) could put itself beyond budgetary reproach.

Climate change: CAP death knoll or saving grace?

The climate change debate has in fact heralded a major shift in society that can be harnessed by the farming community. For decades populations have been migrating to the city, and the share of farming in European GDP and in the workforce has been shrinking. However, the recent emergence of climate and environmental concerns has acted as a wake-up call, putting a new premium on the natural processes that metropolitan populations impact upon but are isolated from.

There is suddenly interest in what scientists, environmentalists, and those who understand nature, have to say. Farmers – as custodians of huge swathes of the EU’s rural land – can make themselves champions of this renaissance.

If agriculture can be revalued through the prism of environmental protection, then climate change might prove to be the CAP’s saving grace. And if the CAP can be greened in a way which genuinely does not exercise downward pressure on food production, and tackles the carbon leakage issue head on, then a well-budgeted, well-understood policy – serving the global public good – could conceivably emerge out of the other end of the reform process.  

There are certainly alternative versions of CAP reform on the table which farmers will find harder to palate.

Another recent report, this time from the European Centre for International Political Economy, came at the CAP from a very different angle. The paper, drawn up by business leaders from Ericsson, IBM, Nokia and other multinationals, warned that the CAP’s generous farm subsidies are continuing to anger the EU’s trading partners, and should be scaled down to strengthen the EU’s negotiating stance at the WTO.

This was all the confirmation farmers’ needed to know that the CAP’s traditional enemies are indeed sharpening their scythes and baying for blood. In this climate, will they be tempted to saddle their interests onto the environmental cavalry?

Photo courtesy of  Shaun Dovey, from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 4:49 pm and is filed under EU. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.