BRUSSELS, February 19, 2018 – Half of EU member states have leveraged the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to significantly reduce poverty and drive higher incomes in farming, while other countries are still lagging, according to the latest World Bank study.
The ‘Thinking CAP’ report details how new investments and services in farming, reinforced by the EU’s flagship agriculture policy, can drive down poverty and transform agriculture into a sector which can provide higher paying jobs for those who farm.
Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Denmark and the Netherlands are all examples of member states that have successfully modernized their agricultural sectors by providing advisory services, roads, secure property rights and access to education and health services in rural areas. Others, such as Bulgaria, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Greece, still have some way to go in reducing poverty and ensuring that agricultural work pays. They can do so by improving the basic conditions for a successful agricultural sector, which would improve the results of the financial investments available under the CAP. Other remaining member states fall in between these two categories - achieving a successful transformation or lagging behind.
“Agriculture and poverty in half of the member states of the EU no longer go hand-in-hand. It’s clear that the income gap between agriculture and other sectors is narrowing and in some countries, such as the Netherlands, agricultural work can pay more than jobs in other sectors,” says Arup Banerji, Regional Director for the European Union Countries at the World Bank. “Today, about half of EU member states recognize that farming can boost shared prosperity, while the other half still has some work to do to provide the basic conditions to bring about necessary structural changes.”
The World Bank report shows that the EU CAP is associated with improving employment conditions in farming. Decoupled payments – annual payments based on how much land a farmer uses – and the co-financing of on-farm investments do show clear links with improvements in agriculture. For instance, in the newer member states agricultural labor productivity growth increases from 3.1 percent to 4.7 percent per year with a 10 percent increase in this type of CAP spending. However, there are certain categories of subsidy – known as coupled payments, which reward farmers for producing a particular crop or livestock— for which the report could find no such association. In the past, these coupled payments also led to extreme overproduction and price distortion on global markets.
“Some countries are running before they can walk by issuing payments to farmers who don’t have the necessary infrastructure to effectively bring their products to market or to make the best use of their investment,” said Rogier van den Brink, Lead Economist at the World Bank. “However, the processes the CAP has put in place are impressive. The CAP casts a very wide net and reaches farmers in every far-flung corner of the EU. Because of this, improvements in the CAP along the lines of the recommendations outlined in our report will further strengthen its role as a powerful instrument of structural transformation.”
Going forward, the report says the monitoring of CAP funds should focus on delivering tangible results rather than confusing bureaucratic processes. This would also encourage the co-financing of private investment into CAP-supported projects which are in the public interest such as environmentally sound practices, organic farming and animal welfare.
