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<\/figure>\n\nThe negotiations between the EU Commission, EU Parliament and national governments are expected to finally draw to a close this month, with the CAP fundamentally unreformed. How, when we face twin ecological and climate crises, can the EU continue to spend tens of billions of euro on such a destructive model of farming?<\/p>\n\n
The EU\u2019s common agricultural policy is huge, accounting for a third of the EU\u2019s budget<\/a> every year. Roughly two thirds of the CAP money is allocated as \u201cdirect payments\u201d solely based on the area of land farmed. The payments have become a way for those who are already big landowners to accumulate public funds, regardless of what they farm or how they do it. This has led to a situation where roughly 80% of all CAP direct payments goes to only 20% of farmers<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n The value of farmland as a way to collect subsidies has become especially evident in the way many Eastern European states have started to divide up previously state-owned land. The New York Times exposed<\/a> in 2018 how 75% of the CAP direct payments in Bulgaria ended up in the hands of only about 100 entities, and how in Hungary the prime minister Viktor Orban ensured farm land holdings for his close circles, constructing \u201ca type of modern feudalism\u201d. <\/p>\n\n In Italy, the mafia has moved<\/a> some of its business from drug trafficking to collecting CAP subsidies for land \u2013 much of which is farmed on paper only. Even if the Italian mafia is now on trial<\/a> and the Czech prime minister Andrej Babi\u0161, whose companies have received annual agricultural subsidies of tens of million euro<\/a>, has been found guilty of conflicts of interest<\/a>, further evidence of misuse of EU farm funds keeps on piling up<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n While it’s well known that agricultural ministers and national governments seem to have little interest in reforming these policies, it\u2019s maybe even more surprising that also the democratically elected European parliamentarians seem to be captured by similar vested interests. Several news reports, for example in Germany<\/a> or in the Netherlands<\/a>, have highlighted how many MEPs, especially in the Parliament\u2019s powerful AGRI committee, are farmers themselves and beneficiaries of the same subsidy system, the rules of which they negotiate. A clear conflict of interest. <\/p>\n\n The most known farmer\u2019s voice in Brussels is undoubtedly Copa-Cogeca that claims to represent 22 million farmers and their families and numerous cooperatives. However, as exposed for example by the investigations of Corporate European Observatory<\/a>, their standing is more closely aligned with big agri-food and agro-chemical corporations than small-scale farmers.<\/p>\n\n These farmer representatives have been opposing<\/a> new EU targets for pesticide reduction together with chemical giants Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta, advocated against<\/a> any limits to subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest landowners and welcomed new GMO<\/a> techniques, that are in the hands of a handful of multinationals like Bayer or Syngenta, to become part of European farming. <\/p>\n\n No wonder that some land owners and farmers have already started to organise themselves in alternative groups like European Via Campesina<\/a> or European organic farmers<\/a>. Or that recently the main farmer\u2019s organisation in the Czech Republic left the organisation as it is failing to defend family farmers and thus the \u201cinterests of the majority of Czech farmers<\/a>\u201d. <\/p>\n\n With the power over European agricultural policies firmly in hands of those with vested interests, it becomes less of a surprise that the soon-to-be-concluded CAP \u201creform\u201d won\u2019t challenge the status quo. Big land owners will keep on receiving the biggest chunks of the public funds. Agriculture will keep on driving biodiversity loss and air pollution. We will see no push from the EU to transition European farming away from industrial animal and feed production, towards more ecological and diverse farming.<\/p>\n\n For a new kind of EU food and farming policy we need more voices of different kinds of farmers to be heard, and decision-making power also in the hands of consumers and health and environmental experts. The farming sector itself is a valid stakeholder, but in the same way that vehicle regulations shouldn\u2019t be left only in the hands of car manufacturers, the agricultural industry shouldn\u2019t be left to regulate itself.<\/p>\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n