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Box 6.4: The EU Common Agricultural Policy<br />
(CAP) and its impacts on biodiversity<br />
The CAP has stimulated important structural shifts<br />
in farming, investments and technological developments,<br />
which has led to resulted in widespread<br />
agricultural intensification in the EU. This intensification<br />
has had well-documented impacts on<br />
biodiversity, including birds, since the 1970s.<br />
According to the Pan-European Common Bird<br />
Monitoring Scheme (2007), the farmland bird<br />
index (an indicator of the health of European farmland<br />
ecosystems) has declined by almost 50%<br />
in the last 25 years. Non-crop plants and invertebrates<br />
have also declined massively, mainly due<br />
to fertiliser and pesticide use.<br />
Many of the remaining species-rich agricultural<br />
habitats are rare or much reduced. A high proportion<br />
of rare and vulnerable species of EU importance<br />
are associated with these threatened<br />
semi-natural habitats and agricultural landscapes.<br />
Many of these habitats and high nature value<br />
farming systems, if not threatened by intensification,<br />
are at risk of abandonment as they are<br />
typically of marginal economic value. These<br />
depend on CAP payments designed to support<br />
farming in disadvantaged areas or to support<br />
environmentally beneficial practices (see also Box<br />
6.5).<br />
Extensive farming systems with high agricultural biodiversity<br />
are often located on marginal land (i.e. land that<br />
would be taken out of production first when production-inducing<br />
subsidies were removed). Stopping<br />
production would have negative effects on biodiversity<br />
with subsequent losses of related ecosystem services<br />
(OECD 2000c).<br />
The close links between biodiversity and extensive farming<br />
on marginal land raises a twofold policy challenge:<br />
• to keep these marginal lands under production and<br />
preserve traditional practices;<br />
• to take out of production those infra-marginal<br />
lands that could deliver significant positive impacts<br />
for biodiversity if converted into natural habitats.<br />
REFORMING SUBSIDIES<br />
This observation does not imply support for productioninducing<br />
support in general. It simply recognises<br />
the fact that subsidy reduction or removal is not<br />
enough, in isolation, to meet the challenge of<br />
maintaining biodiversity-rich extensive farming<br />
systems (see Chapters 5, 7 and 8 for additional policy<br />
tools which can be used to preserve ecosystems and<br />
biodiversity associated with agriculture).<br />
As with other subsidies, production-increasing support<br />
is more environmentally harmful than support<br />
which is ‘decoupled’ from production. Since the<br />
1990s, spurred on by the Uruguay Agreement on<br />
Agriculture, many OECD countries have increasingly<br />
re-designed their support policies in favour of more<br />
decoupled measures which are exempt from the<br />
Agreement’s disciplines under the so-called ‘Green<br />
Box’ (see example in Box 6.5).<br />
<strong>TEEB</strong> FOR NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY MAKERS - CHAPTER 6: PAGE 14<br />
Copyright: André Künzelmann / UFZ