How to integrate sustainable practices into a subsidy scheme that rewards land area will also be a sensitive topic. The scheme has previously been criticized for incentivizing industrial forms of production.

In the conservative corner, EU lawmakers believe negotiations on the next CAP reform should conform with the changes taken on board last month. “To simplify, encourage, and not punish,” said MEP Anne Sander (EPP). 

Sander will find an ally in far-right lawmaker Ivan David (Identity and Democracy), who has made it his priority to slash the impact of environmental policies in the farm budget — mostly by doing away with them.

In light of the wave of farmer protests this year, measures to green farming will likely only advance if farmers can be incentivized to adopt them. That means more reward-based voluntary measures and fewer obligations.

According to Socialist MEP Maria Noichl, public money should be used to support public goods — measures that generate positive effects for biodiversity or the climate — in the next CAP. “This will need some courage to fight against the interests of the European big farm lobby,” she anticipates.

Others, such as Greens lawmaker Martin Häusling, fear that farm lobbies aren’t the biggest threat to a greener future for farming — and that conversely, the EPP’s extending its hand to the far right to abolish environmental requirements is an even greater menace.

Source: politico.eu