Speaker
Description
The future Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (post-2027) is currently under discussion, with the EU Commission set to unveil its proposal in July 2025. Thus, the upcoming CAP will be shaped by a new EU administration, following the EU elections in June this year. The hope is that the next CAP should fulfill, inter alia, ambitious EU sustainability targets defined in the Green Deal, Farm-to-Fork Strategy and the Biodiversity Strategy, considering that the CAP is an instrumental policy to implement some of the listed targets when aligning with agroecological principles. Many scenarios that set out structural changes to the CAP have been proposed, but their potential implications have yet to be evaluated.
Following a literature search, we consolidated published visions for the CAP into four distinct scenarios. Using an online survey, we invited experienced CAP experts to evaluate them. We sought over 200 CAP experts from across the EU working from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds, including academia, NGOs, farmer organisations, rural community groups, consumer advocacy groups and agricultural cooperatives.
Each scenario was evaluated on its strengths, weaknesses, feasibility and barriers to its implementation. The scenarios included in the survey were chosen to cover a wide variety of options and captured the following broad ideas: “Business as usual”, “Strengthening green and social architecture”, “Food System Policy” and a “Substantial reduction of CAP budget”. Experts could also propose their own scenario for the CAP. We also sought insights into the key barriers to reform the CAP and explored potential avenues for overcoming these challenges.
We used a qualitative content analysis to analyse the survey responses. In our talk, we will share the findings and political implications derived from the analysis of survey responses collected (so far) from over 50 scientists and more than 15 non-academic participants. Based on the insights, we make recommendations on how the CAP can optimally help scaling up agroecology in Europe.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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