Last chance for a CAP committed to cultural landscapes and high nature value farming

WWF Spain, Trashumancia y Naturaleza and other partners are still committed to achieve a fair and sustainable farming policy.

At the European level, WWF continues the intense compromise of monitoring the negotiations on the reform of the future Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that are currently taking place in the trilogues (European Commission, European Parliament and Council of Ministers). In this context, WWF is advocating and trying to influence this process by means of the whole European network of offices working on the CAP. Among the different tools generated, an analysis of the ongoing process has been carried out which finds that most of the proposed improvements to the environmental provisions of the CAP strategic plans are at risk of being lost in the final stages of the negotiations. According to this assessment, over half of the improvements to the environmental provisions (52%) are still at risk or high risk of being dropped by the negotiators; 18% have already been scrapped and 11 secured. Despite the intense work done to ensure that this policy will support cultural landscapes and high nature value systems, the news from Brussels are not very encouraging.

Fortunately, we still have the opportunity to compensate for this situation in future CAP Strategic Plans that are currently being designed by the Member States. In Spain, WWF Spain together with SEO/BirdLife coordinates the PorOtraPAC Coalition that join almost 50 organisations from Farming, Environmental and Rural Development sectors, as well as woman, nutrition and consumption experts. Which in turn coordinates with other European coalitions. Thanks to this alliance, more organizations are improving their knowledge and skills about policy making, and so more organizations are campaigning and advocating around CAP. In this framework, we continue working at the highest level trying to influence state and regional governments so that these plans will incorporate explicit support for the SAVN. To this end, among other actions, we have drawn up a proposal to differentiate extensive livestock farming, and also the mobile pastoralism, by means of the characterisation of this sector, or a model to support these systems through the combination of different eco-schemes (new green payments) within the framework of the future CAP’s green architecture. All these advocacy actions are being accompanied by different communication and campaigning with the aim of showing society the need to change the current CAP so that it will give real support to farms that generate greater socio-environmental value, such as Cultural landscapes.

Feature image: © Jorge Bartolomé / WWF

Read Steps towards the differentiation of products coming from extensive grazing in the market