10 tests challenge “deadend” €350 billion EU farm policy

Officials meet as protests intensify

22 January 2020, Brussels – Worried environmentalists say tens of billions of Euros is being set aside for destructive forms of farming under a new EU agriculture policy. Today they launched ‘10 tests’ to track growing conflicts between the policy and green goals.

Officials are meeting in Brussels today for the first time in 2021 for more secretive talks between the EU institutions on the new 5-year, €350 billion farm policy. Final agreement is expected this summer.

European Environmental Bureau policy officer Celia Nyssens said: “Driven by big farm interests, Brussels is cooking up a dead-end deal behind closed doors that would drive tens of billions of Euros of public money to destructive forms of farming. Our tests spell out whether or not the final deal will be at odds with the inspiring vision for a sustainable future set out in the European Green Deal. They are aimed squarely at German and Portuguese negotiators leading the failing talks. Protests and petitions are bound to grow because people are fed up of seeing public money fuelling massive environmental destruction.”

A status quo farm policy will drive the continued rapid decline in small farms and likely derail high-profile international pledges to reduce biodiversity loss and European targets to slash the use of toxic pesticides, the EEB warned. Crudely put, at the current rate of decline, there will be no small farms left in Europe by 2040.

Ends

Contacts

EEB agriculture policy officer Célia Nyssens (FR, EN) Célia.Nyssens@EEB.org
EEB senior communications officer Jack Hunter (EN) Jack.Hunter@EEB.org