Candidates were elusive on agriculture flash points and offered no food policy vision for the next five years.
Party leaders aspiring to be president of the Commission offered few clear insights on agriculture policies during an electoral debate held on Monday evening (29 April) in Maastricht.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen led other candidates in swerving questions on agriculture during the debate and dodged the issue when asked on the withdrawal of a proposal setting up obligatory pesticide reduction targets in the EU.
She deferred decisions on the course to be set for agriculture policy over the next five years to the outcome of a strategic dialogue for the future of agriculture, a reflection group she established last January which is slated to report in September.
“[The strategic dialogue] is the program for the next mandate. We want to do green policies together with the farmers because they are the solution for the protection of nature,” she said.
Asked whether farmers’ protests have led to erosion of the Green Deal, von der Leyen insisted that challenge ahead was to implement the European Climate Law, which fixed a legally binding target for net zero greenhouse gases by 2050.
“This is the law. It’s a must. And we designed the European Green Deal as our new growth strategy,” she said.
She initially did not address a recent simplification of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was rapidly approved to mollify protesting farmers and lowered the environmental ambition of the whole programme.
The reform was criticised by environmental organisations for its incompatibility with the Climate Law, which requires a climate impact assessment for every piece of legislation put forward by the EU executive – something dodged for the CAP simplification due to time constraints.
The Greens spitzenkandidat Bas Eickhout pressed von der Leyen on the CAP simplification later on in the debate, accusing her of “scapegoating green policies over the back of the real concerns that the farmers have” and “watering down the Green Deal for our farmers”.
Von der Leyen defended “a solution where we give trust to the small farms and where we reach our climate goals”.
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, candidate for the European liberal party, stressed that “there is much unnecessary red tape on farmers” and proposed to make reporting simpler and identical everywhere in the EU.
Lack of ideas
Socialist candidate Nicolas Schmit – who said being a farmer was his childhood dream ahead of the debate – said farmers challenges related to their incomes and ability to yield fair prices for their products.
“Farmers have protested because sometimes they have the feeling that their work is not respected and that their work is not paid at a decent level,” he said.
Schmit, the commissioner for social rights, offered little tangible clue as to what actions might be foreseen by the socialists for the sector, however, aside from “reflecting on the way the future of agricultural policy will go” as well as generic efforts “to make farmers also actors in the area of implementation of the Green Deal.”
Two socialist MEPs who heave led agriculture debates in this Parliamentary term – Italy’s Paolo De Castro and Spain’s Clara Aguilera – are not running in the election this year, meaning that future policy will likely be set by the new intake of MEPs.
Asked to specify whether the core point in the Greens manifesto asking to allocate 10% of the EU budget on restoring biodiversity would imply spending less on agricultural subsidies, the Greens’ Eickhout merely said that “Europe needs investment for our nature but also for our farmers” – without specifying how this might be done.
The next Commission should “do something about a market model where the farmers are paying the price”, said Eickhout, without elaborating on what.
