Post a comment on the text below

4.4             Coherence between EU water and agricultural policies

The transition to more sustainable forms of agricultural production to reduce pressures on the water environment require close integration of the implementation of environmental policies with sectoral policies driving agricultural activities and rural development. The Common Agricultural Policy is the main policy that influences the development of the agriculture sector in the EU. It influences how individual farmers choose to manage their land, crops and livestock. In its preamble paragraph, the WFD already highlighted the importance of close integration with the CAP, and RBMPs heavily rely on funding from rural development policies to implement measures on agricultural land (Buchanan et al., 2019).

The current CAP (2014-2020) aims to ensure a stable supply of affordable food, to enable farmers to make a reasonable living and to address climate change and sustainable management of natural resources. The CAP consists in several regulations which are organised around two “pillars”:

• The “first pillar”, financed via the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF), supports agricultural income by delivering yearly direct payments worth 72% of the CAP total budget to 6.7 million farmers (out of 10.5 million), and by intervening on agricultural commodity markets, accounting for 5% of the total budget.
• The “second pillar”, financed under the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), aims to support more broadly the competitiveness, social cohesion and environmental performance of agriculture and the rural economy. It covers the remaining 23% of the CAP budget.

According to the legal proposals presented by the European Commission, the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will continue to be financed through these two funds, but a new delivery model based on greater subsidiarity is proposed (EU, 2018b)

Over the time of existence of the CAP and other sectoral policies, considerable progress has been made to streamline environmental objectives. Yet, there is a need for much more ambitious and far-reaching integration given the slow progress towards good status and continued pressure from agriculture on the water environment (ECA, 2014; EEA, 2018d; EC, 2019a).