Agriculture

Ellie’s interest in agriculture is linked to her personal life: for the past 16 years she and her family have lived on a small (40-acre) organic farm in Herefordshire. Ellie believes that agriculture has a vital role to play in protecting the environment – tackling the climate crisis, and promoting biodiversity – as well as a crucial social role in supporting good jobs and producing healthy food.

So, although Ellie doesn’t sit on the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture (AGRI), she is following its work on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – i.e. the EU’s farming policy. Why? Because:

Agriculture forms a very significant part of the EU’s budget: agricultural subsidies make up about 40% of the EU’s expenditure.
Agriculture is intimately linked with the decline in biodiversity in Europe over the past 50 years
The current CAP is not fit for purpose. While Member States have flexibility over how they implement the CAP: the UK government chose a very complex scheme, and made a real mess of it. Currently, only about 12% of agricultural subsidies in the UK have an environmental element. The other 88% of subsidy is given out purely on the basis of land area farmed. This means that the system benefits the big landowners most of all.

Ellie believes the CAP needs a radical overhaul. Public money should pay for public benefit: good jobs, environmental protection, healthy local food production. The Greens/EFA Group want the CAP reform process to align agriculture with other policies: on climate, biodiversity, health and animal welfare. Greens also want funding to be more fairly distributed.