Download (PDF, 6.71MB) - TEEB

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