It is unlikely that the greening of payments introduced as part of the 2013 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has significantly enhanced the CAP’s performance with regard to the environment and climate because, even without payment, a large number of the subsidised practices would have been applied at any rate. That is the main conclusion of the highly critical report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) on Tuesday 12 December.
The ECA says that greening – a body of three main measures with which farmers have to comply in return for aid amounting to 30% of their direct payments – “led to changes in farming practices on only around 5% of all EU farmland”. Greening remains, then, “essentially, an income support scheme”, says Samo Jereb, the ECA member who led the audit. This new report states that clear, sufficiently ambitious environmental objectives that greening should be expected to achieve were not set and that the budget allocation for greening is not justified by the policy’s environmental and climate content.
In addition, the ECA says that the policy’s likely results do not justify the significant complexity that greening adds to the CAP.
The report recommends a series of measures for the European Commission. Firstly, farmers should only receive CAP payments if they meet a set of basic environmental norms with penalties for non-compliance that are sufficiently severe as to be dissuasive. Secondly, environmental and climate programmes should contain performance targets and have funding reflecting an assessment of costs and income lost through action and practices going beyond the environmental baseline. And lastly, the ECA suggests that an appropriate response can be delivered to specific local environmental needs.
The NGO European Environmental Bureau (EEB) has welcomed the new report and calls on the European Commission to take account of its conclusions before presenting its proposals on the new CAP. “It’s time to move away from untargeted and even harmful annual payments and shift to a truly results-oriented scheme tied to real objective”, the EEB argues.
On the same day, the European Commission published a report, produced by the Alliance Environment and the Thünen Institute (Germany). Without being as critical, this report shows that arrangements as they stand are not effective. It says the commission should find ways to make ecological focus areas (EFAs), one of the three greening measures which are beneficial to the environment, more attractive to farmers. In general, member states should improve the design and the rationale for greening measures to better tailor them to specific regional and local situations and assess progress made in the achievement of these goals in the middle and at the end of the financial period. Lastly, the study recommends that appropriate advice he made available to farmers and that this advice should not be limited to administrative and compliance issues. It should focus rather on the goals of the greening measures and ways of enhancing their environmental and climate impact.
The ECA report is available at: http://bit.ly/2BaREj and the European Commission report at: http://bit.ly/2BfBANO (Original version in French)