The EU ministers for agriculture and fisheries will have their informal meeting in Tallinn, 3-5 September, to discuss “Risk management: empowering our farmers with effective tools to manage the risks post-2020”.
On occasion of the conference “CAP 2020- Towards sustainable agriculture” organised by the Estonian Fund for Nature in Tallin and linked to the Informal meeting of the AGRIFISH Council, Henriette Christensen from PAN Europe says:
'While the paper does in the first sentence speak about the importance of production risk, nowhere in the paper, the importance of creating more resilient production systems based on agronomic practices starting with wide crop rotations is mentioned.
The paper mentions neither greening nor agri-environmental schemes despite the fact that the diversification element of greening could help farmer to spread production risk out, while agronomic measures would help the farmers to develope healthier and more resilient systems, which would be better able to resist weather extremes.
PAN Europe has made concrete proposal in its position paper for how a good mutual fund could look like: “What changes are needed to make risk management tools a suitable rural development measure?”.
PAN Europe encourages the Estonian presidency to include the agronomic aspects of farming and the element of nature based solutions into their conclusions, to build on the Commission Staff Working Document “Agriculture and Sustainable Water Management in the EU” (2017) which was discussed at the AGRIFISH Informal Council on 23 May 2017 in Malta, and to especially highlight the importance of agronomic prevention rather than chemical cure.
Contact: Henriette Christensen, Senior Policy Adviser, Henriette [at] pan-europe.info, Tel +32 2 318 62 55
