Crunch time for the CAP (again)

By Christmas, the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, will make decisions that will shape our countryside for years to come.

He is due to announce how he plans to spend c£2 billion annually of taxpayers money through the Common Agriculture Policy in England. At the same time, his colleagues in the devolved administrations will be making the same decisions. 

While most of the rules have already been set (badly) through the European Union, he still has a choice.   He can either ensure as much of money as possible (max £489m every year) supports farmers that deliver environmental benefits (from which everyone benefits) or he could decide to give most of the money to farmers with few strings attached. 

To date, Mr Paterson has been very clear - the trajectory for farming must be to move away from the subsidy culture and be more responsive to the market.  Yet, he has also been clear that there will still be a case to pay farmers that produced public benefits - helping to protect our water supplies and recover threatened farmland wildlife.  

This is why he is in favour of transferring a maximum 15% from transfers from direct farm support in the so-called Pillar I to rural development programme in Pillar II.

The NFU has been lobbying hard to change Mr Paterson's mind.  While I can understand why a trade union would argue for maximum economic support for their members, their arguments, outlined in their response (see here), I'm afraid, border on the disingenuous.  In particular, they imply that a small transfer of funding (9% albeit with an environment focus) would still maintain agri-environment levels at today's levels.  

Unfortunately, their calculations ignore spending on the uplands and organic strands of Entry Level Stewardship, woodland grant schemes and Catchment Sensitive Farming, therefore underestimating the cost of maintaining support at current levels by around £300m.  And, simply maintaining funding (at best) would do little to address the current parlous state of farmland wildlife: there are 44 million fewer birds today than when I was born in 1970 and 60% of all farmland species (for which we have sufficient data to detect a trend) have declined in this period. 

To be honest, CAP calculations are not straightforward which is why the debate about transfers tends to only be for the purists.  But it has been pleasing that, over the past couple of years, decision-makers have received more than 150,000 public pledges of support for wildlife-friendly farming.

So, in the coming days, keep these thoughts in mind:

- who doesn't want to see wildlife return to our farmed landscapes?   More skylarks providing the soundtrack to our summer, bee and other pollinator populations recovering so they can do what they do best and farmland flowers providing a riot of colour in our countryside.

- there is a growing gap between the cost of government's environmental commitments and available resources to deal with this.  Anything other than a maximum transfer of 15% straight into those agri-environment schemes would be a hammer blow to the Government's environmental ambition and would let down the many farmers who have invested so much in wildlife-friendly farming

- what other sector receives so much public money with so few strings attached?

The CAP has been broken for so long, many have given up the fight to make it better.  Lord Nicholas Stern (of economics of climate change fame) said at last week’s Sustainable Food Trust event: “the CAP is politically antiquated, economically illiterate and environmentally damaging”.  

Even if you agree with Lord Stern, there is still £2 billion of taxpayers money to spend every year, so Ministers across the UK need to make the best of a bad deal and make the CAP money work hard for all of us. 

It's a big decision, and we’re all relying on the Environment Secretary to get it right.