How the Green Architecture of the 2023-2027 Common Agricultural Policy could have been greener

Abstract

A new 5-year Common Agricultural Policy has been in place since January 2023. Like its predecessors, this new policy will fail to deliver significant climatic and environmental benefits. We show how the Green Architecture of the policy relying on the three instruments of conditionality, eco-schemes, and agri-environment and climate measures could have been used more consistently and effectively. Our proposals are based on core principles of public economics and fiscal federalism as well as on research results in agronomy and ecology. Conditionality criteria are the minimal requirements that every agricultural producer must meet. Farmers should be rewarded for efforts that go beyond these basic requirements through eco-schemes for global public goods complemented by agri-environment and climate measures centred on local public goods. Eco-schemes should cover the whole agricultural area by targeting permanent grasslands, crop diversification, and green cover and non-productive agro-ecological infrastructures. We discuss trade-offs that our proposals could generate.

Keywords: Agri-environment and climate measures (AECM); Common Agricultural Policy (CAP); Conditionality; Eco-schemes; Environment; European agriculture.

Fig. 1

The Green Architecture of the 2014–2020 and 2023–2027 CAP. Source Own elaboration from EC (2017), Lotz et al. (2019), EC (2021a, 2021b), Official Journal of the EU (2021), and Pe’er et al. (2022)

Fig. 2

Operating principles of the crop diversification and green cover eco-scheme measure /payment. Source Own elaboration. For simplicity reasons, the x-axis of this figure represents the number of functional crop groups on the farm