Can European agricultural policy help bring about the expansion in organic farming we need?

When Germany’s Merkel Commission on the Future of Agriculture released its 2021 report — which I had the privilege of contributing to — it carried the subtitle “a common agenda.” The message was clear: how we produce our food and manage our land concerns everyone. Society as a whole needs to take responsibility for the transformation ahead. We can’t just dump all the requirements on farmers and tell them, “Figure it out yourself!”

Farmers would be overwhelmed if they had to meet every demand society throws at them without compensation, while simultaneously keeping prices rock-bottom to stay competitive. Yet there’s no denying it: we farmers handle more public goods than any other sector of the economy. We influence water and air quality, shape landscapes, affect biodiversity and produce greenhouse gases.

Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) — How We Got Here

When the founding nations of what would become the European Union agreed on a common agricultural policy in the 1957 Treaty of Rome, they were focused on a different public good: food security. Everyone around the table still vividly remembered the hunger years after the war. Guaranteed minimum prices and targeted investment support were meant to help farmers produce as much as possible.

By the 1970s, though, this policy had become too successful — we were producing too much. The EU had to dump surplus production on world markets at subsidized prices, damaging developing countries’ economies (which lacked the political muscle to protect themselves) in ways that still reverberate today. Meanwhile, managing government-hoarded butter mountains and grain silos cost an insane amount of money. Under pressure from the WTO to level the playing field between economic actors in the North and South, things finally changed. It took until 1992, when Irish Agricultural Commissioner MacSharry lowered and eventually freed prices, replacing them with direct payments tied to hectares of specific crops and livestock numbers in order to support farmers’ incomes.

Even then, EU policymakers realized that completely different problems had emerged beyond food security: the burden that intensive farming methods placed on natural resources — especially water and biodiversity. Later came questions about reconciling industrial animal husbandry with the ethical standards that much of the public expects regarding our responsibility toward fellow creatures. Climate change — and agriculture’s role in accelerating it — became yet another public good the agricultural policy had to address.

To tackle these issues, the Common Agricultural Policy added a “second pillar.” The “first pillar” continued paying farmers who managed land according to existing rules and laws (prompting critics to quip about getting paid to stop at red lights). But now a fifth of the relevant EU funds follow the principle “public money for public services” — supporting activities like biodiversity-friendly management of mountain pastures, leaving field margins fallow, and much more. Here in Europe, this includes organic farming.

CAP Reform for 2027–34

Since these second-pillar payments represent about 16 percent of European agriculture’s value creation, this could have been a powerful tool for securing the public services we urgently need from farming. We could pay farmers for services society demands but the market doesn’t. The EU’s seven-year budget period starting in 2027 could have launched this transformation — gradually, in defined steps, because nothing matters more to businesses than predictability.

But in the current reform process, as in previous decades, the guardians of the status quo seem to be succeeding in preventing this. If the European Commission’s current plans become reality, even past improvements — strengthening the second pillar, linking area payments to minimum environmental standards — could be undone. The Commission wants to shift more agricultural policy decisions to member states. This shields them from taking heat from European farmers for everything that annoys them, but it abandons their crucial role: ensuring fair competition across the EU. Sure, ambitious governments can now protect environment, climate and animal welfare far beyond minimum requirements — they’re given that option. But they won’t do it if their farmers face competitive disadvantages. It could trigger a race to the bottom.

How devastating this could be is shown by the European Environment Agency’s current report on Europe’s environmental state. It provides a comprehensive overview of environmental, climate and sustainability trends and policy effectiveness. According to the report, 81 percent of protected habitats are in poor or very poor condition, 60–70 percent of soils are degraded, and 62 percent of water bodies show poor ecological status. The EEA concludes that without fundamental changes, this situation will worsen, requiring a systemic transformation of production and consumption systems to avoid the costs and consequences of the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Not surprisingly, environmental, organic farming, and animal welfare organizations are highly critical of these plans. But they do acknowledge some positive aspects, like keeping organic farming support mandatory, allowing subsidies for environmental services that go beyond just compensating for lost profits, preferential treatment for small farms, and support for new farmers entering agriculture.

Tools for Expanding Organic Farming

While CAP payments make up a substantial portion of European farmers’ incomes and dominate the discussion, we shouldn’t lose sight of other exciting tools that the state uses to address the common agenda — though usually not at the European level.

When Germany’s Green Party first held the Agriculture Ministry in 2001, it initiated a meeting with a large group of organic sector stakeholders, including farmers, food processors, retailers and scientists. They identified obstacles to expanding organic farming and proposed solutions. A small group (which I was privileged to join) then developed a “Federal Organic Farming Program” that was implemented and continues today. Long before the European organic logo, Germany created one that significantly expanded demand. It was promoted through advertising campaigns that explained what organic farming is and its benefits, building the trust essential for a thriving organic market. 

A comprehensive research program provided substantial funding for the first time. Since 2002, over 520 million euros have been spent this way, with up to 50 percent going to research. These are impressive numbers considering they provided many times what the few institutes at agricultural faculties had to work with previously. Yet it’s still less than 1 percent of public and private research spending in Germany’s agricultural sector.

Nobody can calculate exactly how much these expenditures contributed to organic farming’s growth in Germany. But while the growth has been steep, the political targets aren’t being met at this pace. Germany wants to reach 30 percent organic by 2030; the EU aims for 25 percent by the same date. One could argue that actually hitting these targets matters less than whether the political measures to reach them are seriously and energetically pursued. After all, the state can’t control or dictate how many farmers switch to organic farming or when. But with Germany at 14 percent of farms (EU 4.5 percent) and 11 percent of land (EU 11 percent) being organic, there’s plenty of room for growth. Only a few countries — Austria (27 percent of land), Estonia (23 percent) and Portugal (23 percent) — show what’s possible when conditions are set right.

I don’t want to downplay what organic farming and its supporting policies have achieved over the past 25 years. But one thing is unfortunately clear: even if we managed to reach these ambitious expansion goals, three-quarters of farmland would still be conventionally managed. Given the environmental and natural conditions described above, it’s obviously impossible for conventional agriculture to stay as it is. 

This raises two questions: What needs to happen for the entire agricultural sector’s transformation to gain the necessary speed? And what role does organic farming play?

Both answers are fairly straightforward: when prices tell the ecological truth — when everyone has to pay for the environmental damage their farming methods cause — the transformation will quickly gain momentum. In my book Food Crash I described which levers need to be pulled to achieve this and explained why we wouldn’t have to endure hunger and scarcity if we finally tackled this process.

In such a situation, organic farming would play the role of solution developer. Not because organic farmers are smarter or better farmers, but because the constraints their guidelines impose have forced them for a century to find solutions their conventional colleagues never had to seek. They had a shortcut via chemical industry products.

In this scenario, we organic farmers wouldn’t just be producers of high-quality food for enlightened consumers — we’d be engines of change.