INTRODUCTION

Agroforestry systems and agroforestry practices have been important and valued parts of the agricultural and forestry heritage of Europe for many centuries. Policies for agricultural production and agricultural space in the last decades have contributed towards a separation between “forest” and “agriculture”. In this chapter, some European Union (EU) policies are presented and discussed, policies that deal with, or should deal with agroforestry systems and practices, with a focus on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

First, the evolution and changes of the CAP are briefly presented and then agroforestry systems and practices in the CAP are discussed. The text concludes with proposals for a closer integration of agroforestry systems and practices in the new CAP.

Agroforestry systems and practices were almost completely ignored for a long time by policies for agricultural and rural development.

Eu Policy For Agriculture And Agricultural Space

Agricultural policy was already important to the first Member States of the EU from 1957, when the Rome Convention was signed. It was the first and the only common policy with an emphasis on food safety and farmer incomes. The approach of the CAP was very strongly sectoral during the first decades of its implementation and its interventions were mostly for big farms and a few widely cultivated crops.

The CAP introduces the concept of the monetary subsidy of farmers in order to face the high production cost of food in Europe. Initial payment mechanisms favored bigger and more intensive farms and accelerated or made easier the transition towards an agricultural production with fewer and much more industrialized and intensive farms, reinforcing spatial and productive separation between agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry.

In the 1990s two parallel discussions began: the first centered on the effort to transform agricultural policies from sectoral to a mix of sectoral and spatial, and the second revolved around the integration of environmental and agricultural policies. The result of the second effort was the introduction of the so-called accompanying measures from 1992 onwards, while the CAP became more spatial after its reform in 2000. Since then, Member States are called to prepare Operational Programmes (OPs) that take space into account, with one of the three axes that they need to rest on is the “environmental” one (the other two refer to the competitiveness of farms and rural development). This turn is very important both conceptually and in terms of objectives and allocated funds. The reform which is to be completed in 2023, includes, for the first time, the so-called “Green Deal” that deals not only with the CAP, but also assumes a zero emission target for 2050. The objectives for agricultural production are: ensuring food safety in the light of climate change and biodiversity loss reducing the environmental and climate footprint of food systems in the EU strengthening the resilience of the EU food system leading the global change towards competitive sustainability “from farm to fork”

Especially the “farm to fork” strategy is here to link, for the first-time, farm practices with transport and consumer choice. How these objectives are translated into specific measures and the plan for their implementation are less clear and a vagueness characterizes the type of interventions and their financing. This is due to a reduction of the totally available budget and a simultaneous increase of compulsory obligations for farmers. At the same time, although it is now established that climate change and its impacts are already a reality, this does not correspond to the measures and interventions.