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Incentivising sustainable farm practices

Under the CAP 2014-2020, farmers could receive a “green payment” for implementing three types of measures: (i) crop diversification, (ii) maintenance of permanent grassland and (iii) Ecological Focus Areas (EFA). Member States and farmers had significant leeway in implementing greening measures.

Experience indicates that farmers preferably implemented “productive” EFAs, including nitrogen-fixing crops and catch crops, which are deemed beneficial for water. Some countries have also banned the use of fertilizer and pesticides in these productive EFAs, further enhancing their potential benefits to water. Other relevant EFAs were offered, such as landscape elements (e.g. hedgerows and wood strips), afforested areas, agroforestry and maintenance of permanent grassland, but they were less popular amongst farmers.

Recent evaluations indicate that conditions attached to greening measures were also often not ambitious enough. Many EFAs for instance did not always go much beyond existing cross-compliance requirements (ECA, 2020; Devot et al., 2020). The European Court of Auditors (ECA, 2017) concluded that Member States used the flexibility in greening rules to limit the burden on farmers and themselves, rather than to maximise the expected environmental and climate benefit. Hence, no major changes at the farm level were required to receive the payment (Chartier et al., 2016; EC, 2017). Furthermore, their full potential were not always achieved because of lack of targeted advice to position them optimally at the farm and landscape level (BIOGEA, 2020)

The new green architecture proposes a Pillar I payment in the form of an “eco-scheme” to incentivise more sustainable land management through direct payments. This intervention is planned to be mandatory for all member states, but will be voluntary to the farmer. Because Eco-schemes tap into CAP Pillar I budget, Member States can mobilise more funding for incentivising sustainable farm practices and reach a much larger number of farmers (Lampkin et al., 2020).