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Ministers have urged the EU to increase funding for the €60bn-a-year Common Agricultural Policy subsidy scheme in a bid to quell protests as Belgian farmers blockaded roads and set fire to tyres in central Brussels.
The CAP, which consumes about a third of the EU’s joint budget and is the oldest of the bloc’s policies still in operation, is designed to provide a steady stream of income to farmers in order to ensure food production.
But as farmers staged their latest protests on Monday over rising costs and environmental regulations, ministers arriving in Brussels to discuss emergency measures to placate farmers said more money was needed.
Charlie McConalogue, Ireland’s agriculture minister, said the CAP budget must be “increased and strengthened” because farmers’ income “hasn’t kept pace” with other sectors, adding: “That is something that we have to address — making sure that the CAP budget addresses the massively important work that farmers do on a day-to-day basis.”
David Clarinval, Belgium’s agriculture minister, said “farmers need to be paid for what they do . . . There are elements of the [EU’s climate law] demanded of farmers that are not remunerated. That is the core of the problem.”
The debate comes amid heated discussions over priorities for the EU’s joint budget, with governments reluctant to contribute more due to stretched national finances and a need to spend more on defence after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.
The CAP accounts for €386.6bn of the bloc’s €1.21tn common budget, which runs from 2021 to 2027. Some 80 per cent of the scheme’s money goes to just 20 per cent of farmers.
Farmers have not only called for more funds but also a relaxation in environmental regulations and a reconsideration of trade deals that they say are allowing cheap food imports to undercut prices for EU producers.
In Brussels on Monday, hundreds of tractors blockaded streets close to where ministers were meeting. Riot police had set up barbed wire barricades around the main buildings.
Several protesters brandished placards with slogans such as “leave a future for our children, don’t kill our parents”. Police used water cannon to douse burning tyres.
The demonstrations follow weeks of protests across EU countries including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania and Spain. Farmers blocked a major motorway in Poland on Monday and threatened to continue their blockades for more than 20 days unless their demands were met.
French President Emmanuel Macron missed a G7 meeting at the weekend as he spent 13 hours meeting farmers at the country’s annual Salon de l’Agriculture trade show. He called for “calm” after facing protests at the event.
“We’re not going to be able to fix the farming crisis in a few hours,” he said.
The European Commission has proposed a series of simplification measures aimed at easing the administrative burden on farmers when it comes to accessing CAP funds. Ideas include allowing farmers to use land that should be set aside for grassland for arable crops and exempting small farmers from the CAP’s environmental requirements.
It has also withdrawn a flagship proposal to cut pesticide use and deleted emissions reductions targets for agriculture from a document outlining options for future EU climate policy.
In a letter to the commission on Friday, Copa Cogeca, the main farming lobby group, said the bloc’s environmental agenda had resulted in “a regulatory tsunami, with too many rushed consultations, top-down targets lacking assessment, and proposals pushed through without feasibility studies”.
FUGEA, which represents smaller farmers and was one of the Belgian agricultural groups behind Monday’s protest, said it would continue organising demonstrations until “real progress” was made.
“Europe does not seem to understand what is at stake and is coming up with proposals designed to appease the strongest,” it said.
Additional reporting by Andy Bounds in Brussels
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