A new decade, a new CAP

Five leading European farming and environmental NGOs, who between them boast several million members, have jointly published a blueprint for a new Common Agricultural Policy. In an unusual and very modern step, they have published a draft proposal and opened it for consultation. They will produce a final version in 2010. The proposal, which runs to 28 pages, is for a radical reorientation of the CAP away from a productivist and income support model towards a ‘public money for public goods’ ethos.

The proposal, which comes from BirdLife International, the European Environmental Bureau, the European Forum on Nature Conservation and Pastoralism, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements and WWF, begins with a fierce critique of the current CAP. It is argued that most of the €55 billion spent by the EU on the CAP “still goes to a very small number of large or resource intensive farms, and all too often to those engaged in unsustainable practices.” The leaps in agricultural productivity in the EU over the past 50 years have

“been based primarily on unsustainable use of natural resources and has brought significant negative environmental effects.”

Specifically, the proposal refers to over-exploitation of water, over-reliance on fossil fuels inputs, soil erosion and depletion of soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, decline in the character of landscape, pollution of rivers and seas and increased pesticide residues in foods. Climate change means this model of intensive agriculture will become ever less sustainable than it already is. Meanwhile, European farming has shed much of its workforce and many of Europe’s remote rural areas are in apparently terminal social, environmental and economic decline.

Sursa.

Documentul aici.