Brussels, 15/06/2015 (Agence Europe) - Farmland grabbing, a problem concentrated in eastern member states, is limited but growing within the EU, according to a study presented on Tuesday 16 June to members of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
The authors of the report, carried out by Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) at the behest of the Parliament, call for a reform of governance in this area.
The study found “significant, albeit partial evidence that farmland grabbing is underway in the EU today” in the form of “large-scale land deals”.
According to the study, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland are the main hotspots for farmland grabbing in the EU. In these countries, in 2010, 50.6% of land area was held by 2.7% of farms.
Lack of transparency. The study, which regrets “the lack of transparency around land deals in the EU”, underlines that the size of the landholdings acquired in these new transactions - which can sometimes amount to thousands of hectares of land - “represent a deep rupture with family farming and the associated farm sizes that have characterised European farming so far” to the detriment of the socio-economic and environmental vitality of the rural sector. “The degree of foreign ownership in various EU member states is particularly alarming when set against the longer term trends towards land concentration and land inequality which have created structural biases against Europe's small, young, and aspiring farmers”, the report states, while acknowledging that “the scale and scope of farmland grabbing in the EU is however limited when compared to countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and former Soviet Eurasia”.
In addition to the establishment of large agroholdings in Europe with the involvement of capital from all over the world (the Bulgarian agricultural sector, for example, has received investment from China, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel in recent years), this race for land has seen the appearance of a “new category of investors” not traditionally involved in the agricultural sector, the report notes: banking groups, investment funds (Rabo Farm Europe Fund, Generali, Allianz, et al), individual traders and private equity companies.
Along with these come a rising new class of deal brokers: “speculators and scammers, who mediate corporate and state interests in land”.
Adjusting the common agricultural policy. To put the brake on farmland grabbing in the EU, the study recommends extending the scope of “justifiable restrictions to the principle of the free movement of capital” to allow member states “greater regulatory control”. It suggests, too, that a European Observatory be set up. The report also calls for “adjustments to the 2013 CAP toolbox”: - set the rate of internal convergence of payments to 100% on new and older member states; - adopt the redistributive payment as soon as possible and with the highest share of Pillar 1 of the CAP; - consider a lower aid cap of €100,000; - use the young farmer scheme to the fullest extent possible; - monitor application of the CAP's new greening policies; - use coupled payments to strengthen sectors in difficulty; - adopt a definition of an active farmer which is “clearly anchored in the notion of work on the farm”. (Lionel Changeur)