The climate crisis is accelerating, and farms across Europe are vanishing. Industrial agriculture drives both – yet the EU keeps pouring public money into it through its main farming policy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Our campaign calls to #rebootCAP: stop funding climate destruction and start supporting farmers who protect climate, nature, communities, and food resilience.
The EU’s main farming policy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), impacts what we eat and how much we pay for it, but also our health and our environment – in short, our lives and future in Europe. It’s time we got involved!
Right now, the CAP hands out subsidies – public money – based on the size of land rather than how food is produced. Pay-by-hectare rewards large landowners and industrial farmers, so taxpayers in the EU are effectively sponsoring the super-rich of the food system. Meanwhile, millions of smaller and ecological farms are being forced out of business. By favouring industrial agriculture, the CAP is also reshaping Europe’s landscapes. Polluted rivers, collapsing biodiversity, and dead soils undermine essential ecosystem services such as clean water, pollination, and flood protection. In the long run, citizens will pay with higher health costs, reduced food availability, and skyrocketing costs for environmental clean-up.
This means that we do not receive fair value for the taxes we pay. Our money should instead support clear public benefits. Farmers could play a crucial role in producing healthy food, protecting natural resources and habitats, caring for our rural heritage and landscapes, and addressing issues such as flooding and drought. Yet in just 15 years, more than five million farms have vanished in the EU – that’s about 970 farms closing every single day. The majority were small family farms, swallowed up by expanding industrial farms. Our analysis found that the EU lost 44% of its commercial farms between 2007 and 2022, most of them small-scale. At the same time, the number of mega-farms grew by more than half, and the very largest almost doubled.
Here are the main challenges smaller farmers face:
The CAP is currently under review and this is our chance to change it. We pressure the EU into supporting farmers in need and initiating a fair and just transition to ecological farming.
Find out more about the impact the current system has on us:
Take action! Write to the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who are currently discussing changes to the CAP. Use our English template or translate the message to your native language if writing to an MEP from your home country.
Our Run for Reform game [link to game]: it’s more than just a game; it exposes the hard truth that millions of farmers in the EU face.
Play the game and change reality.
More information: https://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/issues/nature-food/47254/go-big-or-go-bust-report/
Creating uncertainty and calling it “simplification”
The European Commission has announced a plan to amend the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) to weaken reporting requirements for EU traders (a category that includes manufacturers and retailers, regardless of their size) and small and micro companies that produce commodities and products in the scope of the law.
Beef from cattle illegally raised on protected Indigenous land in the Amazon rainforest may have ended up on the plates of European consumers after entering the supply chains of Brazilian beef giant JBS, a new study by Greenpeace Brasil has revealed.
