German state agriculture ministers can’t agree on spending more on climate
Agrarheute / dpa
The 16 German federal states have been unable to find a solution on how to spend farming subsidies allocated to Germany in 2022 from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), dpa and agrarheute report. Federal agriculture minister Julia Klöckner (CDU) called the outcome of the ministers’ meeting “disappointing and sobering,” saying she considered it a “missed opportunity” that the state governments didn’t take a decision. The federal ministry would now proceed without input from the states, Klöckner said after the meeting.
One major disagreement was over shifting funds from the so-called first pillar of the CAP (direct payments to farmers according to the size of their farm) to the second pillar, used to fund rural development in 2022. While the CDU-governed states wanted to shift not more than six percent of the funds to the second pillar, agriculture ministers from the Green Party wanted to increase this share to ten percent. In the run-up to the meeting, environmental NGO WWF had urged the ministers to choose the highest possible figure – 15 percent – for shifting the funds, since “so far, these measures are one of the few instruments to provide farmers with effective and targeted financial support for the protection of climate, water, biodiversity and animal welfare," WWF Nature Conservation Director Christoph Heinrich said.
Greenhouse gas emissions from the German farming sector amounted to 68 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents in 2019. According to the country's Climate Action Law, they will have to be reduced to 58 million tonnes by 2030.
