ENCA Seminar: ‘Greening of CAP Pillar 1 Payments – can it be done better and simpler?’ Closing remarks – Karin Robinet
(German Federal Agency for Nature
Conservation and Chair of ENCA Interest Group on Sustainable Landuse and Agriculture)
Dear colleagues, It’s now my role to conclude today’s programme and to invite you to the postseminar reception. I am doing this on behalf of the ENCA Interest Group on agriculture and sustainable landuse. Let me thank you all again for coming and for making such a valuable contribution to this afternoon’s discussion. I’d also like to thank all speakers for their very thought-provoking presentations. I know that I’m speaking for everyone, when I stress how useful we found all of the presentations - and I’m sure they will stimulate a lot more further thought…….. I’d also like to thank our hosts, Scotland House and Muriel Gerbaud. I think we all felt very welcome and organization has gone extremely smoothly. ENCA (that is the network of the European Nature Conservation Agencies) has a number of Interest Groups, formed by researchers and policy advisors from across Europe, all of whom work on topics of strategic relevance for biodiversity. Because agriculture impacts so heavily on biodiversity – both in positive as well negative ways – we concentrate a lot of our work on informing agricultural and biodiversity policies.
EUROPEAN NETWORK OF HEADS OF NATURE CONSERVATION AGENCIES (ENCA-net): http://www.encanetwork.eu
The agriculture and sustainable land use group first started work in 2007, when we looked at the positive impacts of the former set-aside policy and the environmental consequences of discontinuing that approach. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that today we wanted to look at the topic of “greening of Pillar 1 – in particular can it be done better and simpler”? Some other topics that we’ve been looking at include: Some of the different perceptions on how the CAP could evolve in future further, and this is the reason, why the British Land Use Policy Group (LUPG) asked the ENCA network for collaboration for the study “Lessons Learnt”, which is launched today and Kaley Hart has presented main points. The wider context for the ongoing development of the CAP –in particular the debate on–„sustainable intensification in Europe“ , coming to the conclusion that the European agriculture has to become more sustainable The impacts and achievements of agri-environmental measures on biodiversity The financial needs involved in meeting European biodiversity goals, especially when it comes to maintaining and enhancing the Natura 2000 series. Like many of you, we recently contributed our evidence to the EU-Consultation on experiences with the first year of greening the CAP, reflecting and highlighting some points which are important when evaluating the impacts of greening on biodiversity, but have not been raised. You’ll find this on our website Currently the group consists of researchers and advisors from seven Government funded member-organizations, which are presented in the slide behind me. However, we’d be very pleased to welcome further members, in order to widen our perspective and ensure we collect evidence on as wide a range of European situations as possible. Please, do not hesitate to express your interest, if you work as in a government based agency or are interested to be invited as expert and guest. Today we’ve tried to understand the stages of CAP-reform development and the lessons learnt from the last reform and the challenges given to prove the
EUROPEAN NETWORK OF HEADS OF NATURE CONSERVATION AGENCIES (ENCA-net): http://www.encanetwork.eu
additionality of greening. We learned that in the UK there has been made considerable effort to establish a baseline, to proof the additionality of greening and I wonder, whether this has been the case in other countries too. As we have pointed out in our consultation statement, a baseline for measuring the achievements of greening is not in place yet. In the case studies today, we were looking at the scope and the composition of the Ecological Focus Areas, because this can give indication on the impacts of the measure. We have seen the examples of Poland and Austria demonstrating that the way farmers choose the implementation of Ecological Focus Areas (EFA) give little indication, that there will be a considerable improvement in terms of positive impacts on biodiversity. However the case studies have given us an insight into the diversity and complexity of the implementation process. In the case study of the cooperation approach in the Netherland it has been shown that better administration can play an important role in improving greening, Similar the Swiss Case shows that advising farmers can improve the situation and increase the outcome of the agricultural measures. Many questions remain, however, especially in terms of which of the implementation choices delivers most for biodiversity? Looking at the different options for the further development of the CAP, one of the obvious criteria for assessing these is the impact they will have on the environment including biodiversity. At the moment there exist serious doubts about whether greening in its existing forms can deliver what it is needed in terms of the stated European biodiversity goals. For that reason, please allow me to highlight some aspects of the debate in Germany. Germany is one of the four EU-MS, where the farmers are given more than 15 choices to fulfill the demand for Ecological Focus Areas. Last year in October, the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture published the full dataset on the registration of ‘Ecological Focus Area‘ by farmers in 2015 in Germany. And it has been shown, that farmers in Germany uses options with a strong focus on the production function. Fallow land, buffer strips and Landscape elements count
EUROPEAN NETWORK OF HEADS OF NATURE CONSERVATION AGENCIES (ENCA-net): http://www.encanetwork.eu
only 19.8% of the whole ecological focus area, which is disappointing from the point of view of biodiversity. A lot of fundamental questions have been raised in the panel-discussion. There is widespread interest in establishing whether the results of ‘greening’ are going to be reasonable in comparison to the existing levels of expenditure on greening, currently equivalent to some 9% of the entire EU budget. Last year in October the German Environmental Ministry launched the German “Naturschutzoffensive 2020”. This is a set of measures designed to underpin the national strategy on biodiversity. The Federal Environment Minister, Barbara Hendricks, has spoken out in favour of restructuring agricultural subsidies and introducing a new European financing instrument for nature conservation. To quote her, she said “I want to put nature and landscape conservation back on top of the agenda. The need for action is greatest in the agriculture sector. The gap between targets and the actual situation is widest in arable farming. The sums awarded to farmers should take into account the efforts undertaken by farmers to boost nature conservation " (BMUB, press release Oct. 2015). As the ENCA Interest group on agriculture and sustainable land use it’s our aim to carry on gathering evidence so we can contribute and inform this debate, which is taking place at different levels and in different ways within each Member State. Tomorrow we’ll be meeting to decide on how best to carry on with this task. But one of our first priorities will be to produce a report on today’s seminar as well as presenting today’s presentations at the website of ENCA-network. Finally my thanks goes to Prof. Feindt. It is your credit that we are finishing the seminar in time. Your very able facilitation now allows us now to enjoy the afterseminar reception! Please do stay and use the chance to socialize and to prolong the discussion. Thank you very much – Danke schön!
EUROPEAN NETWORK OF HEADS OF NATURE CONSERVATION AGENCIES (ENCA-net): http://www.encanetwork.eu
