The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has not achieved its goals on social and environmental sustainability, claims a report published on 21 November by the NGOs BirdLife and EEB and the Greens/EFA and Social Democrat (S&D) political groups in the European Parliament. The European Commission has not carried out a health check of the CAP, so these organisations decided to conduct their own study. The communication on the future of the CAP after 2020 is due to be adopted by the European Commission on 29 November (see EUROPE 11908).
The socio-economic efficiency of the CAP, with close to €60 billion spent annually is very poor. The number of farms continues to fall. The trend is towards an increase in size. 32% of payments are received by 1.5% of farms. The CAP is not doing enough to support small farms, the report states. Direct payments come in for particular criticism: “direct payments received the largest budget allocation yet without justification are clear links to CAP objectives”, the report says. It argues that there is nothing to indicate that direct payments go to the farmers who need them most.
The report also highlights CAP's environmental shortcomings. The policy has not moderated current trends towards agricultural intensification, environmental degradation and biodiversity decline. And it has a very limited impact on mitigation of climate change. Worse still, the greatest investment is devoted to the least effective measures from a biodiversity perspective.
The targeted instruments, such as agri-environment and -climate measures (under the second pillar) are successful at local and regional levels but failed to scale up to the EU level and the CAP as a whole. The main inhibitors are limited budget, low uptake, and poor design and implementation. Greening, introduced in the last reform, makes 30% of direct payments conditional on a number of environmental requirements. But it is not enough to reverse negative trends, because of broad exemptions enjoyed by some and low requirements on crop diversification and ecological focus areas.
The report is available at: http://bit.ly/2jIqZDR (Original version in French)