New rules aimed at restoring nature have unleashed a major fight that endangers the EU’s climate agenda.
Farmers say they’re already doing a lot to become more sustainable | Sebastien Bozon/AFP via Getty Images
Brussels is coming for the bloc’s last largely unregulated polluter — farms — and that's unleashed a toxic mud fight.
The European Commission’s ambition to green the bloc’s agricultural model will be put to a decisive test Thursday when the European Parliament's environment committee holds a vote that could kill off a major plank of the EU’s Green Deal.
The conservative European People's Party is going all-in to sink the bill that's meant to restore 20 percent of degraded land to a good natural state by 2030; the group claims that threatens farmers’ livelihoods by potentially taking their land away and undermining food security.
The campaign could derail Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's Green Deal project — the bloc's grand plan for climate neutrality by mid-century. After fighting off resistance to measures aimed at cutting emissions from energy, transport and industry, the EU wants to do the same to farms — but that's proving to be even more explosive.
EPP leader Manfred Weber says his group will reject the nature restoration proposal on Thursday, not because it's opposed to a green transition for the farming sector but because “bringing about a change of this magnitude cannot be improvised.”
“Professionals need concrete, clear rules, a precise timetable and a list of foreseeable consequences ... the exact opposite of the catalog of far-fetched and abstract measures proposed by the European Commission,” Weber argued.
The EPP has also teamed up with farmers’ organizations to open fire on other green legislation targeting farmers, including new rules to halve pesticide use and plans to slash emissions from big farms.
Opponents accuse the Bavarian politician of going too far to achieve his group's aims. Environment Committee chair Pascal Canfin, with the liberal Renew Europe group, said Weber was "blackmailing" his own MEPs with the threat of expulsion if they don't follow his push to reject the Nature Restoration Regulation on Thursday.
The vote is likely to be extremely tight, with the result hinging on a handful of nonaligned, liberal and conservative lawmakers. Failure in the environment committee increases the likelihood it will be killed off at a plenary vote scheduled for July — blowing a hole in the EU's climate agenda.
Angry farmers
Farmers say they’re already doing a lot to become more sustainable and they want the Commission to wait for the results before throwing new regulations at them.
“We are willing to do our part” in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss, said Pekka Pesonen, the head of the EU farmers’ lobby Copa & Cogeca. He said the Commission’s proposal is “not realistic, nor is it practical,” and that's leading to “huge frustration for the farm community.”
Critics counter that the lobby is entrenching an outmoded farming model that simply won't be viable in the long term.
“Farmers are led to believe that if they don't have a certain synthetic chemical, they will not be able to make a living,” said Eric Gall, deputy director of IFOAM Organics Europe, a business association promoting organic farming.
The bloc pumps a third of its annual budget into the sector through its Common Agricultural Policy — but has so far failed to slash agriculture's carbon footprint. In 2020, agriculture made up 11 percent of the bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that's been relatively constant since 2005.
Researchers and campaigners argue that political reluctance to implement tough regulation is partly to blame for that lack of progress.
There’s a history of “agricultural exceptionalism,” said Elisabet Nadeu, a senior policy analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.
The CAP was born of the need to safeguard European food security — and while it is now slowly switching gear to greener practices, its structure hinders large-scale transformation.
Agriculture is “primarily targeted through subsidies,” said Jonathan Verschuuren, a professor of international and European environmental law at the University of Tilburg. “If you want to have a big shift toward a more sustainable business, then what works best is very strict targets."
The bloc’s approach to agriculture also reflects the power of entrenched farming interests in Brussels and EU capitals.
The “biggest and strongest lobbies” are defending a food and farming system that is harmful human health, the environment, and small farmers “who are disappearing at — to say the least — alarming rates,” said Marco Contiero, Greenpeace EU’s agriculture policy director, pointing to the steep decline in the number of farms in the EU.
Intensive agriculture is associated with high methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and identified as a key driver of pollution and biodiversity loss.
Slashing that impact is all the more urgent as climate change and biodiversity decline pose the greatest threats to agriculture and farmers’ livelihoods in the long term, scientists say.
“There will be a massive food security issue in 2050 if we keep on producing the way we are producing right now, so this transition is extremely important exactly for food security reasons,” said Verschuuren.
Tough sell
That’s a message Brussels has trouble getting across.
Despite preparing the ground with a host of strategies and action plans on food, forest management and biodiversity, the Commission has been struggling to find a majority in favor of its latest green push in the Parliament and among EU member countries.
The impact of Russia’s attack on Ukraine is making it an even tougher sell to farmers hit by disrupted supply chains and higher costs. National governments have also pushed back on green rules targeting farming, undermining the message that for agriculture to survive in the long term it must go green.
Paolo di Stefano, Brussels director of the Italian farm lobby Coldiretti, said the group initially backed the Commission's idea but now isn't happy that Brussels is pressing ahead “without taking into account that the world has changed.”
The EU executive can't even count on its own agriculture commissioner to defend the Green Deal: Janusz Wojciechowski sided with the EPP when he shared a tweet that criticized the Commission's stance on agriculture and said "we can only achieve our climate goals with farmers, not against them!"
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