On the eve of the vote on the Water Resilience Strategy, scheduled for Wednesday 7 May, the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture has attempted to increase its influence on the text with a series of amendments.
One of them is a red line for the Greens/EFA, because it calls for a revision of the current Nitrates Directive. The Committee on Agriculture says it wants to “promote circular nutrient management”. But the Greens/EFA no longer want to “reopen environmental legislation”, a parliamentary source told Agence Europe.
According to the same source, the S&D has agreed with the EPP to vote in favour of the Committee on Agriculture’s amendments, with the exception of amendments 15 and 16.
The first deletes a sentence from the report that identifies resilience in the water sector as “a cornerstone of policy development and implementation” in order to lead to “a change of model, in which water ceases to be seen as an infinite resource and is recognised for its intrinsic value to humanity and the ecological landscape”.
In amendment 16, the Committee on Agriculture calls for a legal framework to “prevent authorised projects from being systematically called into question”, explaining that this creates “legal uncertainty for farmers and regions”.
Amendments tabled in the opinion of the Committee on Agriculture on the report by Thomas Bajada had already enabled the text to be watered down before the vote in the Committee on the Environment on 16 April. One of the Articles that disappeared reaffirmed the EU’s objective of “restoring freshwater ecosystems” by 2030.
The other Article deleted identified agriculture as “the main source of pressure on surface water and groundwater”. Thomas Bajada explained that this was due to “water use and pollution caused by the intensive use of nutrients and pesticides” and that the agricultural sector is “the largest net consumer of water in the EU23”.
The report did identify agriculture’s responsibility in establishing clean and sufficient water in the EU, but did not propose any strong, binding measures to remedy the situation in the own-initiative report to be voted on by MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday 7 May.
Agriculture accounts for around 29% of all water abstraction in Europe, behind industry (40%), according to the report. At EU level, agriculture is even “the sector with the highest net consumption of water”.
The agricultural sector is being asked to increase “its efficiency” and reduce its “water consumption”, and to move faster towards circular, water-saving agriculture. However, Parliament did not propose any binding targets or deadlines in its own-initiative report (see EUROPE 13617/17). (Original version in French by Florent Servia)