On 7 February, round two of the EU Budget negotiations begins. For those of you that have not been following this saga, 27 Heads of State need to agree how to spend about a trillion Euros over the 2014-2020. Their meeting next week is the latest attempt to thrash out a deal. The last time they met, the bits of the Budget that offer the best value for taxpayers money and supported the environment, seemed to be most at risk of being traded away.
Our major concern remains the fate of funding which supports wildlife-friendly farming (the so-called Pillar II of the Common Agriculture Policy). This provides a lifeline for species such as turtle dove and cirl bunting as well as supporting farmers to deliver environmental public goods which the market doesn’t reward.
We've produced this short video to explain the significance of the Budget:
We hope that it inspires people to contact the Prime Minister and give him a clear message to agree a Budget that works for wildlife.
This is a very difficult area but I'm convinced RSPB must keep shouting as loud as possible - my only difference with what RSPB has been doing since it got involved in agricultural policy is that I do feel the time has come to start saying that some aspects of what we are doing are just plain wrong - especially the support to the biggest agribusinesses that Pillar 1 provides. That doesn't actually stop negotiation within the system as well - a 2 track approach.
The other issue for me is that understandably RSPB's message, as in this blog, is all about helping farmers be wildlife friendly - which, bluntly, any in the farming world will see as rather fringe. Are there other alliances we could be building ? For me, the biggest is that CAP is simply not doing what it set out to do - and the problems for our EU partners are massively bigger than what we face in the UK - in countries like France CAP is failing to keep people on the land in the remoter areas - in sharp contract to the UK, whole rural regions are becoming de-populated as villages are simply abandoned as the last old person dies. Pumping up Pillar 1 doesn't help - but the interests of those marginal farmers and conservationists have far more in common than we generally recognise - butterflies, for example, in upland/mountainous parts of Europe are in sharp decline due to the decline in grazing & scrubbing up of the pastures they depend on (forest cover in France is increasing by 70,000 ha pa, kostly through natural regeneration of formerly grazed land).
It applies equally here - the Environment Agency has just said it isn't cost effective to dredge the rivers on the Somerset Levels to prevent the extensive flooding of farmland that hasn't yet completely receded. Farmers in places like this actually urgently need a new deal - which, for example, shares some of the cost savings through spending less on drainage not to compensate them but rather pay for a different type of farming which farms water as well as stock.