Towards a farmer-centric CAP rooted in Agroecosystem Health

The paper particularly develops integrative and inclusive perspectives and arguments that are seldomly pointed out in other policy documents, but are present in all farmer and industry discourses across Europe. This is done not because we underappreciate the successes of past CAP governance or the work of the people involved, but because we want to build a better mutual and pragmatic understanding of the tasks and potentials ahead.

In Part I, we reflect on the CAP’s importance to Europe’s social, economic and environmental development, as well as its current legal basis. The current social and scientific evidence on agricultural, environmental, health, food system and security governance in Europe is appalling. Key trends continue to go in the wrong direction and show no sign of turnaround. A structural reform of the CAP is urgently necessary to face the polycrises in agrifood systems in Europe.

In Part II, we set out premises for a successful agrifood system transformation in the form of agro-economic, -sociological and -ecological working theses. New understandings in the sciences of ecology and agronomy, such as the critical importance of the (evapo)transpiration of water by living plants, go hand in hand with a farmer-led revolution of agricultural praxis that lifts the productivity of ‘farming with nature’ on a new level. This opens the way for an exciting and promising leap in agricultural and governance innovation at a time when it is critically needed.

In Part III, we sketch the design of simple, fair and performance-based payments as the core of a structural reform of the CAP post 2027. Context-specific photosynthesis and soil protection performance are the key indicators of agricultural land use management. Such payments allow for a long-term governance perspective that is centred around farmer and agroecosystem health.

We describe in detail the technological, financial, governance and political aspects of a future CAP design anchored in such payments. With a switch to fair and simple hectare-based direct payments coupled to agro-ecological performance, the CAP can decrease farmer dependency on external inputs and increase on-farm climate change resiliency. Anchored in result-based payments for agroecosystem health, such a farmer-empowering CAP design aims to foster simplification and planning security with a long-term perspective in the agricultural sector.

A fair and simple performance-based CAP can deliver:

• structural simplification & fairness
• rapid spreading of context-specific innovation
• farm labour attractiveness
• synergistic integration of productivity & ecology
• an immense co-financing opportunity of Member States for climate change adaptation
• meaningful public reengagement with rural livelihoods, farmer wellbeing, local regions, landscapes and communities
• healthy and sustainable food security in Europe and beyond
• the strengthening of social cohesion and European sovereignty
• a rerooting of the European project in the health of our European continent and its inhabitants

Only with farmer and agroecosystem health at its centre, a CAP reform holds significant potentials for facilitating the necessary leap in transformational governance – to enable the urgently needed regeneration of our agrifood ecosystems and create a chance to positively re-engage with our communities, our regions, our nations and our European continent for peace and economic stability, on a planet supporting life.