Bas Eickhout: Insights on EU agricultural and energy policy Bas Eickhout is Member of the European Parliament, and an expert on climate policy. He further sits in the Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development. In the fourth lecture in the series “Deeper into Europe”, organised by the Green European Foundation together with Bureau de Helling and the Dutch Green Party’s working group on Europe, he discussed both how he see Europe’s role in energy policy, as well as the current trends in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.
Energy: “Once you’re mainstream, things happen quickly” Climate policy “Climate policy is more than setting C02 reduction targets and leaving the rest to the market. There are measures which can also help cut costs, such as energy saving. These measures should have been put into effect long ago.” But the market is too often counterproductive. “Consider home insulation. House buyers don’t invest in insulation because they aren’t sure whether they will remain living there long enough to profit from it. Neither do people invest in better insulation for rented homes, because it is the tenant who pays the electricity bill but the landlord who decides.” And then we haven’t even started talking about technologies that require substantial investments long before they become profitable. “That is where one country alone can conduct a successful policy. Solar energy and land-based wind farms needed heavy investments well in advance. Several countries including Germany took that route.” And now these renewable energy sources are competitive. The “energy revolution” has its drawbacks too. “In Germany, private energy consumers have had to foot the bill. Industry was spared in the interest of protecting jobs. That is an unfair sharing of the burden.” The role of the EU in energy policy lies principally in the area of creating infrastructure. In winter, wind energy generation is more productive in northern Europe, but in summer the yields of solar power are higher in southern Europe. “That means you need a ‘super grid’ to connect
up these areas. The more areas connected to the super grid, the less fluctuations there will be. Spain’s energy revolution has ground to a halt. The surplus electricity generated has nowhere to go, because the Iberian Peninsula is poorly connected to the rest of Europe. That is an example of infrastructure on which the EU has skimped.” Biofuels “The European Union is clearly capable of conducting a successful policy, as we have seen with biofuels. In this case, however, the European Commission was too quick off the mark. Now all kinds of interests have started throwing their market weight around. The biggest lobbyists against a new biofuel policy are agriculture and the new biofuel industry. One problem with biofuels is the indirect agricultural land use they entail. Biofuel crops are cultivated in Europe, while farming for food production moves elsewhere. This accelerates deforestation in those other countries. The European Parliament has been persuaded to take this indirect agricultural land use into account from 2020 onwards in evaluating the sustainability of different biofuel sources. It remains to be seen whether this decision will survive the negotiations with the Council.” Geopolitics “The reason Europe does so little about energy is that it is seen as ‘foreign policy’, implying that Europe can do little about it. The EU talks of renewable energy, but meanwhile EU member states have signed some sixty bilateral contracts for gas with Russia and North Africa. The North European Gas Pipeline between Russia and Germany, for example, is currently under construction.” Geopolitical interests also play a part for new member states like Poland. “Their climate policy means that they become more dependent on Russian gas. The Polish economy is currently powered by coal for ninety percent of its needs.” If they are compelled to opt for renewable energy, it will mean that importing Russian gas is better for the climate. “Poland is looking into the possibilities of shale gas. Exploiting shale gas reserves causes serious problems for the local population. The legislation package of the European Commission undertakes to refrain from legislating against shale gas extraction, in order to win the assent of the Polish government. The omnipotence of the “European super- state” is rather disappointing: in its proposals, the Commission tries to make small concessions to all the member states.” “We hear a lot about the topic of ‘peak oil’.” But the market is now finding new ways to extract oil, for example from tar sands. Tar sand oil extraction is harmful to the landscape and the extraction process results in considerable CO2 emissions. Shell, like other oil multinationals, is heading to the North Pole to prospect for petroleum. They are a one- trick pony, and they perform the same act in ever more vulnerable
Bas Eickhout: Insights on EU agricultural and energy policy
regions. If you don’t care about the environment, there is plenty of petroleum. But the threat to the world climate imposes ever tighter restrictions. Today’s global oil reserves are much greater than the climate can bear.” “The market won’t solve the climate problem. The solution must come from policy. A crucial condition for that is that our concerns become mainstream. Everyone claims to care about renewable energy as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. But changes are going to hurt, so they will call for political courage. It is the long term that counts for the Greens. The Dutch cabinet hopes to one hundred percent of our energy to come from renewable sources by 2050. The Greens must try to hold them to our own ambitions. Germany is a good example of how a country can achieve a lot. The whole political spectrum supports the energy revolution. Things can happen quickly once you become mainstream, but the Netherlands is still a fossil fuel country.”
Agriculture: “It’s time to think critically about our patterns of consumption” Bas Eickhout represents GroenLinks in the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development. Here he sheds light on current policy, suggests an alternative and examines the political realities that stand between the dream and the deed. “Our picture of what agriculture ought to be like is not romanticised. We aim to follow a modern agricultural policy, but one that is different from the well-trodden technological route favoured by Wageningen1.” The second part of his intervention in the “Deeper into Europe” lecture therefore focused on agriculture policy. Agricultural policy ought to play a central part in how we produce our food and simultaneously protect natural resources such as the soil. This calls for a green interpretation of the EU agricultural strategy. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is widely scorned as a piece of megalomania, but Bas Eickhout defends it. “I’ll wager that if the CAP didn’t exist we would end up spending even more money on agriculture in the EU. The CAP forbids member states to subsidise their own agriculture, which would run counter to EU policy. All internal competition is channelled through the CAP, which thereby saves money.” Forty percent of the EU budget goes to agriculture. It sounds a lot, but the Dutch government alone spends twice as much as the whole EU budget. We would be glad to reduce that expenditure, but it would mean leaving agriculture at the mercy of the market. Eickhout’s criticism is that if agriculture is liberalised any further, there is one thing certain: large-scale agriculture will predominate even more than now. In the present policy, 1
Wageningen University is known both in the Netherlands and internationally for its focus on agricultural sciences.
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on the other hand, there is too much emphasis on how to produce in quantity rather than on how we go about producing. The Wageningen route The proportion of the earth’s surface used for agriculture has grown immensely in the last hundred years. But there is not much room left. “From a production point of view,” Eickhout points out, “there is little scope for further expansion in the European Union, the USA, India or China. The largest capacity for agriculture is in the tropics. But exploiting that land clashes with green values such as protecting biodiversity and nature, as the tropics play a major part in stabilising the global climate. So they are not the right place to expand the area devoted to agriculture. The clearance of forests for farming is one of the main destroyers of biodiversity. In EU countries, no more than about 40 to 50 percent of the original biodiversity remains. For the Netherlands the corresponding figure is only 10 to 20 percent. Let’s hope that this country isn’t taken as a model for the rest of the world.” “If you can’t expand the area of farmland but want to feed a growing population,” Eickhout continued, “you have to raise productivity. In Wageningen, they aim to raise the yield per hectare. That can be done by increasing the use of artificial fertilisers. The outcome is a build-up of nitrogen in the oceans, which is very bad for marine biodiversity and for air quality. Is that a model we want to keep promoting? It’s a dead-end street. But not everyone in Brussels agrees with me; most politicians are satisfied with ‘business as usual’.” An agricultural policy based on green ideals We could solve problem partly by innovation, although Eickhout believes the time is ripe to think critically about our patterns of consumption. The Netherlands ranks first in the world for the quantity of animal products consumed – not the United States as you might expect. This is due to our consumption of dairy produce. The idea that “milk is good for you” has been thoroughly drummed into the Dutch; after all, the dairy farming sector needed to grow. But the Americans are front runners when it comes to meat consumption. China too has been catching up in the last ten years. “The Chinese middle class is growing, and they want to eat meat. China has no room to expand its area of farmland, so it has to import animal feed from tropical countries like Brazil.” Europe must become more self-sufficient in animal feed. The European Union has striven to become selfsustaining in food production since World War II. This policy has so far been very successful. But the EU still depends on imports for 80% of the feedstuff for its farm animals. If those imports were to stall, the livestock sector would be in serious trouble. At the same time, the environmental damage caused by
Bas Eickhout: Insights on EU agricultural and energy policy
all the imported feedstuff products is ignored. Eickhout criticised: “We are exporting our environmental burden. As a result we don’t even notice that our level of meat consumption harms the environment. It cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.” Resource depletion The present agricultural system is on the whole unsustainable. “We must extract fewer resources from the earth and do more to promote a closed nutrient cycle. Farmers should use crop rotation to avoid depleting the soil, by alternating with crops that boost soil nutrient levels.” Among mineral resources, phosphorus is one of the most serious problems. It is a crucial ingredient of artificial fertiliser, along with nitrogen and potassium. “Phosphorus is a constituent of DNA, so any organism that engages in cell division – and that includes you and me – needs phosphorus.” Phosphorus is obtained by mineral mining. Recent projections indicate that peak phosphorus output is likely to be reached in the near future. This is a widely underestimated problem with a serious geopolitical component. Europe’s main source of phosphorus is Morocco, which mines the phosphate rock in the politically unstable Western Sahara. Not even twenty percent of the extracted phosphorus ends up in our tissues. Most of it is lost at various points along the production chain, with a large proportion making its way into the ocean. Artificial fertilisers are used for the cultivation of fodder crops, and the animals convert much of that into manure. We eat the animal products, and then we ourselves flush a large proportion of our phosphorus intake through the sewers into the sea. Our consumption of animal products is an important point of discussion because it represents the most inefficient possible use of nutrients. Innovation is essential here. “A lot of phosphorus goes into our sewers. We could recover it but that would entail a different structure for our sewer systems. This is not an easy topic to get onto the agenda, and the market is not going to solve it.”
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years. “We had a chance to make it greener and to set it on a new course. It was the first time the European Parliament had a share in the law-making. We wasted that opportunity. The composition of a specialist committee matters a lot. In the agriculture committee, I was especially disappointed with the social democrats. When the social democrats and the Christian democrats collaborate, they hold a majority of 70 percent. A Green MEP can’t do much about that.” Eickhout considers the new agricultural policy utterly feeble when it comes to greening: the recent policy contains few measures to bolster it. The most serious shortcoming is that farmers are required to “diversify” rather than implement crop rotation. But diversification says nothing: most farmers do it already. The Dutch farmers’ business-as-usual attitude is rewarded. But now that a presumed greening takes place, the coffers for rural development, from which farmers are rewarded for environmental services such as water storage, are empty. That is why the Greens ended up voting against the new agricultural policy. The main reason for not reforming agricultural policy does not lie with the European Parliament, however, but with the Council. “Dutch prime-Minister Rutte tabled three demands during negotiations for the last budget: less money for Brussels, a reduction of one billion euros in the Dutch contribution and less spending on agriculture – although the last demand received little emphasis in Brussels. The first two goals were achieved, and the conservative Dutch daily De Telegraaf was proud of Rutte. But the outcome was actually as follows: the North-Western countries placed a cap on the EU budget, the Southern countries (notably France) won guarantees for the non-green agricultural budget, and the East European countries blocked reduction of the Structural Funds. That is an unhealthy combination of northwestern frugality with southern and eastern conservatism.” The money had to come from somewhere, and it was innovation that carried the can. The funding for Neelie Kroes’s digital programme was cut from nine billion to one billion.”
This article was written by Bas Eickhout. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors’ alone. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Green European Foundation. © Green European Foundation & Bureau de Helling, February 2014 With support of the European Parliament. Compromises in Brussels Green European Foundation asbl The new agricultural has been, in Bas 1, rueEU du Fort Elisabeth,policy 1463 Luxembourg Eickhout’s view, the worst disappointment of the last five Brussels Office: 15 rue d’Arlon, 1050 Brussels, Belgium Phone: +32 2 234 65 70 - Fax: +32 2 234 65 79 E - mail: info@gef.eu - Web: www.gef.eu