ABSTRACT
The collapse of biodiversity is – along with climate breakdown – a clear and present danger to our civilisation’s survival. The first cause of biodiversity loss, globally and in Europe, is agricultural expansion and intensification. In the European Union, farming practices are heavily influenced by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), one of the world’s biggest systems of public subsidies. Thirty years of attempted reforms have shifted the CAP from paying for production to untargeted income support and, in theory, to rewarding farmers for delivering public goods such as biodiversity and watershed management. Unfortunately, in reality, the bulk of the CAP still goes to environmentally harmful practices, while effective environmental payments are severely underfunded. The latest European Commission reform proposes a massive repatriation of powers to member states’ agriculture departments to spend the money as they wish. Past experience suggests this is likely to worsen the situation: benefiting well-connected beneficiaries rather than addressing bona fide societal concerns. Much hangs in balance with the debate on the new CAP, but avoiding ecological collapse will require more than subsidy reform; from strict enforcement of environmental laws, to new food policies to reduce over-consumption, waste and the use of land for wasteful bioenergy.
