The next CAP needs to encourage a much needed transition allowing farmers to start seriously working with nature. The CAP should incentivize farmers to progressively adopt agronomic practices to strengthen soil health and to create landscape features attracting predators of crop pests and stimulating the presence of pollinators.
For this to happen, the CAP legislative proposals need to put in place a holistic system which supports farmers, financially and technically, to embrace change. We consider that such a system should include: (1) Strengthening the conditionality requirements; (2) Creating effective eco-schemes that encourage farmers to take a first step towards changing their farming practices through specific yearly commitments and (3) Designing more long-term rural development measures that follow-on from ecoschemes. Under this step-by-step approach, obligatory measures are combined with voluntary measures with increased levels of ambition.
At the same time, to ensure that the New Delivery Model (NDM) functions properly in measuring the performance of the CAP, it is crucial to create and improve indicators measuring its effects on nature. We need to be able to assess the effects of the agricultural transition that we are calling for.
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