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The EU must not prioritise guns over butter in its defence spending spree and should refrain from redirecting funding reserved for farmers, the bloc’s agriculture commissioner has warned.
Christophe Hansen told the Financial Times that an increase in military expenditure should not come at the expense of the bloc’s €387bn Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for a third of the EU seven-year budget.
“It is difficult to build a continent on an empty stomach,” Hansen said. “The current geopolitical situation shows us very clearly how important food security is in order to be less vulnerable to blackmail from third countries.”
Governments have started negotiations with the European Commission and the European parliament over the next trillion-euro budget, which runs from 2028. Brussels has put forward a radical overhaul that could see some current funds, including CAP, merged into one pot that would allow capitals to redeploy monies towards new priorities such as defence.
The commission is also bracing for a fight with member states over increasing national contributions to the budget as interest payments on the bloc’s unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic loans could eat up a fifth of annual spending.
The idea of pooling the CAP budget into a single fund along with regional spending programmes has met fierce resistance from the farming community.
The EU’s biggest farming lobby group Copa Cogeca said that it had prompted “unanimous concern across the agricultural sector” and that Brussels should also increase the CAP budget and index it to inflation.
Countries with vocal agricultural sectors, such as Ireland, have indicated that they would oppose a single fund if it involves the CAP.
Hansen said a single pot could mean “more synergies and that could be beneficial” but that it was “too early” to say what the size of the CAP would be, as member states had not agreed the level of their contributions.
He added that “we need a specific, commensurate budget for agriculture” and that “additional requirements”, such as for cutting emissions or improving biodiversity on farms “should come with additional financing”.
The agriculture sector has complained that Brussels has placed too many environmental demands on them in order to access CAP funding, which is currently doled out on a per hectare basis but with certain conditions attached.
Violent farmers’ protests last year led the commission to water down many of the conditions such as compulsory crop rotation and maintaining non-productive features such as hedges which support wildlife.
This week the commission proposed to exempt organic farmers from several of the environmental demands and make compliance less demanding.
Fears of being undercut by cheaper and less rigorously monitored imports was also a central complaint of last year’s demonstrators. Hansen said production standards were non-negotiable in the event of any EU-US trade deal, describing it as “politically risky” to open up the EU market to livestock raised using growth hormones.
He added, however, that there had been a boom in interest in the sector for deeper trade relations with countries such as Japan and that despite the EU’s high standards other countries were still keen to do business.
“The European market is a very strong market [and] is able maybe to pay better prices than other markets,” he said.
