The EU Common Agricultural Policy Needs Further Ecological Reform
Max Cocard, MSC International Political Economy
Image: Tim Mossholder / Unsplash
The EU and its Member States are in the midst of profound ecological change, affecting nature, humans and the economy alike. Agriculture as a sector represents a non-negligible share of the Union’s emissions (12%), which explains recent efforts to incorporate environmental objectives within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). However, their progress – as for the European Green Deal as a whole – remains uneven, uncertain, and contested. While negotiations for the future CAP 2028-2034 framework are underway, I argue that urgent reforms are necessary in the face of accelerating climate breakdown.
What is the CAP?
The CAP has governed the agricultural policy of the European Commission since 1962. According to Article 39 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU, it aims to increase agricultural productivity, ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, stabilise markets, assure the availability of supplies, and ensure reasonable prices. It is divided into two pillars. Pillar 1 covers direct payments and market support, while Pillar 2 focuses on rural development as well as environmental measures. With a budget of 386.6 billion euros between 2021 and 2027, it represents the largest source of EU expenditure, accounting for 32% of the total sum.
The current framework, CAP 2023-2027, entered into force on January 1, 2023, with the ambition of being a modernised policy. According to the European Commission’s website: “It seeks to ensure a sustainable future for European farmers, provide more targeted support to smaller farms, and allow greater flexibility for EU countries to adapt measures to local conditions”. It introduced national Strategic Plans allowing each Member State more flexibility, ten specific objectives including climate change and environmental care, and specific eco-schemes rewarding farmers for preserving natural resources through, for example, organic farming or agro-forestry.
Dating back to 2014, the inclusion of climate objectives into the CAP has been greatly expanded by the launch of the European Green Deal in 2020. This ambitious set of policies aims to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 55% in 2030 (baseline 1990) and 90% in 2040 in order to reach climate neutrality by 2050. Agriculture as a sector is not exempt from the need to reduce its environmental footprint. According to Eurostat, GHG emissions linked to agriculture have declined from 490 million tons in 1990 to 411 million tons in 2001, 378 million tons in 2012, and 365 million tons in 2023. While this 26% decrease is encouraging, its slowing rate and limited overall reduction highlight the current shortcomings of a failing system.
Two major limitations: pro agro-industrial and livestock biases
The limitations of the CAP can be summarised into two main critics. Firstly, its design disproportionately favours big conglomerates. The money handed out to farmers is based on the size of their farm rather than their need for support (basic income, decent living standards, wellbeing, etc.), encouraging bigger farms and higher production levels at the cost of sustainability and animal welfare. Indeed, under Pillar I, most CAP income support is paid per hectare farmed, allowing a small number of farms to capture a disproportionate share of funds. According to a 2019 report by the European Commission, around 20% of farms receive 80% of direct payments. The largest beneficiaries are often agro-industrial enterprises and landowners, not family farms. This has clear environmental consequences, as farm size in the EU is correlated with production intensity, land concentration, and ecological pressure (see Moretti et al., 2025).
Secondly, the CAP disproportionally favours livestock production and consumption, especially meat. Again, because most subsidies are area-based, they strongly benefit livestock systems, which require large areas for feed crops and permanent grassland. Thus, a large share of payments indirectly subsidises animal feed and intensive large-scale livestock farms capture high payments through land ownership. A study in Nature Food found that animal-based foods use 82% of subsidies and are associated with 84% of GHG emissions but supply only 35% of calories and 65% of proteins. Additionally, livestock represents the single largest source of land use, water pollution, and biodiversity loss globally. Coupled with environmental degradation, human health also suffers, as Europeans eat more animal protein than recommended according to the EAT-Lancet Commission.
What future ecological direction for the CAP?
Thus, despite the progressive inclusion of environmental factors into the CAP over the past decade, the overall results remain underwhelming. On July 17, 2025, the European Commission unveiled its first proposal for CAP 2028-2034. It aims to simplify delivery while strengthening environmental objectives, through more targeted income support and incentive-based agri-environmental actions. It acknowledges longstanding imbalances by envisaging greater redistribution of payments, including capping subsidies to large beneficiaries, and by better distinguishing extensive, low-impact livestock systems from intensive production. However, key limits persist as area-based support remains central, many corrective tools are left to Member State discretion, and no binding mechanism addresses overall livestock intensity. As a result, structural biases toward large farms and animal production risk persisting without more radical alternatives.
A note published by the Institut Avant-Garde proposes to make new subsidies proportional to environmental performance under a bonus-malus system, rewarding good behaviour and penalizing ecological degradation. This scheme would reduce the automatic advantage enjoyed by large farms and penalise practices with high negative externalities, while rewarding diversified systems that deliver ecological benefits. The same report also recommends coupling payments to agricultural employment instead of hectares, thus redirecting support toward smaller, labor-intensive farms, often associated with more agroecological practices (see Moretti et al., 2025). Together, these instruments also correct the implicit bias toward livestock production by discouraging intensive farming. Ultimately, this would reorient the CAP away from land ownership and production volume toward public goods provision and rural employment.
Finally, a successful reform demands a comprehensive and holistic approach. With this objective in mind, the Shift Project conducted its Grande Consultation des Agriculteurs (Comprehensive Consultation of Farmers) in France. It concludes that the “agriculture transition objectives cannot be sustainably achieved without ensuring the economic viability and prosperity of farms”. Their findings show that 93% of surveyed farmers are willing to accelerate or initiate their transition to agroecological practices, but 87% of them condition this shift on financial incentives. These numbers add another layer of complexity to the previous critics. Whilst the CAP must cease favouring prominent conglomerates and livestock production, it also needs to provide decent living conditions to farmers, especially those who engage in the ecological transition. This dual objective leaves us with the following conclusions. Firstly, a basic income for farmers should be created at the European level. Secondly, the EU should refrain from concluding free-trade agreements – such as the current EU-Mercosur proposal – if they unfairly undermine local, ecological farming. Thirdly, it is crucial to remember that the agricultural sector is increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change, whilst farmers are simultaneously and directly suffering from the negative health effects of pesticides. The future CAP, thus, needs to prioritise better tying together ecology, health, and farmer’s living conditions, in order to be successful.