The EU urgently needs to staunch the greenhouse gases and pollutants coming out of its farms – dirtying the land, air and water – if it is to meet its goals to protect nature and stop the planet from heating. But in the last year, EU efforts to green the agriculture sector have sparked furious protests from farmers, with the support of some far-right groups. The tensions have led politicians to water down some green policies and ditch others entirely.
How healthy are Europe’s soil and species?
More than 80% of habitats are in bad shape, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA), and only 27% of assessed species have a “good” conservation status.
The ground has fared even worse. Most European soil is unhealthy, with 60-75% containing too much nitrogen and 80% containing pesticide residue. The EEA estimates the cost of soil degradation across the continent to be about €50bn (£42bn) a year.
What are farmers required to do to protect the environment?
Over the last few decades, the EU has brought in and built up directives to protect water, birds and habitats, and to manage nitrates. The rules that affect farmers range from limits on when nitrogen fertilisers can be applied to protections that keep some areas of nature free from farms altogether.
In 2021, the EU tied a new set of green strings to the common agriculture policy (CAP) subsidy scheme, most of which came into force in 2023, and devoted a greater chunk of the budget to green schemes. To receive CAP payments, farmers would have to comply with “good agricultural and environmental conditions” such as maintaining a ratio of permanent grassland to farmland, and protecting wetlands and peatlands.
But over the last year, many of the CAP’s green rules were weakened, delayed or deleted. The EU scrapped a requirement to devote a small percentage of farmland to features that are not directly productive, such as planting trees and letting fields lie fallow, and exempted all farms smaller than 10 hectares (25 acres) from the rules.
Another package – the Farm to Fork project – included a proposal for a more sustainable pesticide regulation, which would have solidified the European Commisson’s target to halve the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 2030. That was also withdrawn.
And the nature restoration law, a cornerstone of the EU’s green deal, was heavily watered down and only passed in June. It now sets targets to protect and restore nature but does not directly force farms to change. The law contains targets to rewet peatlands and help birds recover, for instance, but specifies that these are voluntary for farmers and landowners.
The EU also downgraded a provision to make farmers increase the share of land with nature-friendly features. This has resulted in a complex formulation with three indicators of biodiversity: member states must improve two. (The other indicators are the population of grassland butterflies and the organic carbon content in crop soils.)
What else is the EU planning?
In September, farmers, retailers, consumer groups and environmentalists held strategic dialogues, at the suggestion of the commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and their shared vision is expected to feed into a plan that the commission will present in the coming months.
The proposal calls for “urgent, ambitious and feasible” change in farm and food systems, with financial support to help farmers get there. It also acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than doctors and scientists recommend, and calls for a shift toward plant-based diets supported by better education, stricter marketing and voluntary buyouts of farms in regions that intensively rear livestock.
However, stakeholders could not agree on making farmers pay for their pollution under the EU’s emissions trading scheme. The system, which indirectly puts a price on carbon, is being expanded from the electricity and industry sectors in 2027 to cover buildings and road transport, but not agriculture.
Does the EU have an obligation to clean up its farms?
The EU signed a global agreement in 2022 that promised to halt and even reverse biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. It has also promised to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
Neither goal will be possible without addressing the agriculture sector, which has faced less pressure to go green than many other parts of the economy, and made less progress. In the two decades from 2000 to 2020, EU member states slashed the greenhouse gas emissions from their energy supply by 40% but cut their agricultural emissions by just 10%. The transport sector made similarly slow progress.
On Thursday, the EEA found the agriculture sector had cut emissions by just 2% in 2023, and the transport sector by 1%, even as overall emissions fell by 8%.
