EU should tackle unfair prices, not CAP environmental measures - opinion poll

Posted on March, 15 2024

The European Commission’s move to bulldoze a swathe of the Common Agricultural Policy’s environmental measures today is an ill-informed attempt to stop farmers protesting that is out of touch with public opinion and science. According to a new independent opinion poll, the majority of people in France, Germany and Italy believe ensuring fair prices for farmers, and helping them deal with the impacts of climate change, are the most important areas for the EU to act.

The survey, conducted by Stack Data Strategy [1] and commissioned by WWF, found that 43% of respondents think the EU should ensure fairer prices for the products farmers sell, 35% believe the EU should help farmers deal with the impacts of climate change like floods and drought, while just 8% think that the EU should make environmental standards weaker.

Anu Suono, EU farming policy officer at WWF, European Policy Office, said: “The European Commission is completely misguided: blindly scrapping environmental measures without listening to the people and the science will not appease farmers who are suffering from unfair prices and the climate emergency. Farmers deserve a CAP that looks after their long-term needs for viability, not rash measures that have been rushed out since the farmers' protests without any impact assessments.”

The move also flies in the face of the Commission’s own scientists. On Monday, the European Environmental Agency warned that the climate emergency will “compromise food and water security”, adding that the CAP does not address the climate emergency adequately and that risks to crop production in Southern Europe are already at a critical level. “Healthy soils, rivers, lakes and seas are critical natural resources for food production,” the report says [2].

“As the EU’s own scientists at the European Environment Agency have found, farming needs nature to survive. By scrapping green measures in the CAP, the EU is destroying the best tool in the box to ensure sustainable farming and Europe’s food security: nature,” added Suono. “The EU is also completely undermining the ‘strategic dialogue’ on the future of farming it has only just started to discuss.

Notes to the editor:

[1] https://www.stackdatastrategy.com
[2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/european-climate-risk-assessment

Poll March 2024