This post was written by Sebastian Lakner and Guy Pe’er (guy.peer@idiv.de)
In the following, first blog-post in a series of three, we evaluate the Council conclusions of early September 3, 2020 against the current CAP (2014-2020), looking into some of the details that were released by the Germany presidency. Especially, some of the most important environmental criteria in the CAP-proposals of 2018 (e.g. GAEC 9 and Eco-schemes) seem to be largely disarmed, coming back to an even weaker version of Greening. The Council-conclusions have already been commented, e.g. by Alan Matthew or on Arc2020, however we will add to the debate by contrasting the Council conclusions with figures from the actual CAP-period. A lot of black smoke seems to hide an attempt to maintain or even expand the “errors” that have led to the failure of Greening and to the large-scale misspending of taxpayers’ money over the current funding period (Scown et al. 2020 in One Earth).
A second post will examine the policy process and its consequences for the CAP in the long run. We will discuss the role of the German presidency in trying to minimize conflicts with farm lobbies through setting a lowest possible denominator, instead of showing leadership in moderating an in-depth, balanced negotiation process.
A third post in the series will focus on solutions, such as a phasing-in-model for Eco-schemes that could resolve some of the problems (e.g. for Eastern Member States) and may aid compromise-finding.
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