Greening Payments

With the food-demand problem solved, other problems became salient: land abandonment and biodiversity loss are rising threats to Europe’s ecological systems. As a result, greening payments were included in 2013 in CAP.

 

Part of the compulsory schemes, the green payments[17] oblige every member state to allocate 30% of their direct payment funding to greening. Farmers must prove that they follow certain practices such as crop diversification, maintenance of permanent grassland, or ecological focus area. However, the environmental conditions and agricultural systems differ across Europe. As a result, member states can choose to allow farmers to meet the greening requirements through alternative practices which have an equivalent or higher benefit for the climate and the environment.

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Do Greening Payments Work?

Jennifer Hauck - a social scientist and an expert on biodiversity and agriculture -  conducted a study with farmers and the factors which influence their decision making. She found that, in the decision making, the economic factors are clearly present. This is understandable as they are trying to earn a living, which might be the case for the farmer in the example above. Farmers have a lot of economic issues, regardless of the support from CAP, so even though many interviewed farmers care about the environment, their priority is to survive.

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In a review paper about the greening rules, authors state that the greening measures are ineffective to a large extend; they do not work at all in the way they are implemented now[11]. Hauck states that most of the greening measures have a range of options of what farmers can do. Unfortunately, they choose the options which are not helpful for biodiversity. They choose them as they are the easiest to implement, the cheapest and easiest to control.

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In general, it is often very difficult to see a direct positive impact of environmental measures. Due to a lack of visible results, some farmers may have trouble understanding why these measures are important and will simply see them as additional criteria.

 

Nils van Rooijen adds the point that, even though in theory it’s a good idea, the condition about ecological focus areas may not work well in practice. Rooijen is a Dutch ecologist and vegetation scientist whom is connected to Wageningen University and Radboud University in the Netherlands. He emphasises that one of the most important factors for success is that these focus areas (or let’s say nature development areas) are connected, and this is not implemented in the arrangement we see from CAP. It is very important to have these larger areas and smaller areas, but if these areas are not connected the species can not get there or “escape” from there if needed, thus it won’t make a difference. These connected zones are the baseline of ecological function.

 

Collateral effects?

So far we discussed measures designed to influence biodiversity. But is it possible for other existing aspects of CAP to affect biodiversity? The small farmers scheme (SFS) is a simplified direct payment scheme granting a one-off payment to farmers who choose to participate. The idea is to enhance the competitiveness of small farms, and reduce the administrative burden[58]. More than 75% of farms in EU are below 10 ha, with the large majority being below 5 ha. The maximum level of the payment is decided at national level, but may not exceed €1,250. The SFS includes simplified administrative procedures, and participating farmers are excluded from greening obligations and from cross-compliance penalties. It is applied in 15 EU states but represents different shares of the direct payments in these countries[17]. It is available to farmers who are approved for the BPS or SAPS, and the actual size of the farm does not matter. The farmers had to apply by the last quarter of 2015 and after that there is no opportunity to opt-in anymore, only opt-out[58]. As most farms are considered small, and also larger farms could have applied for this scheme, one can only imagine what impact this has on biodiversity and the environment when all these farms do not have to follow the greening regulations. Perhaps this is one of the cause of the ineffectiveness of greening rules.

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Looking towards the future

An important detail to this whole discussion is that CAP will be reformed again in 2020. This means that there are a lot of opportunities for improvement. However various sources argue that the current proposed reforms will do nothing but strain the already fragile biodiversity of the Old Continent.