Recent updates Archives - Page 26 of 86 - Agricultural and Rural Convention

MFF – Increased EU Budget for Biodiversity and More

November 11, 2020 Alison Brogan

Biodiversity, organic farming, young farmers and other areas received a welcome financial boost from the EU institutions on Tuesday (10th November). The European Parliament’s negotiating team and the German Presidency of the Council reached agreement on the forthcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the EU’s budget for 2021 – 2027. […]

CAP Reform | So Far Not A Game Changer For Young Farmers, Says CEJA

November 10, 2020 ARC

What do young farmers want from CAP reform? In this email interview, Alessia Musumarra, Secretary General of the European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA), acknowledges some wins in the European Parliament, identifies where more ambition is needed, and lays out what CEJA hopes to see from the trilogues. […]

Letter From The Farm | Grateful For Invisible Friends

November 6, 2020 Chiara Garini

We’re back on Chiara’s forest farm at the foot of the Italian Alps, where there’s much to be grateful for. Chiara updates us on an abundant shiitake harvest, her mushroom business going wild, and finding solace in fungi as “invisible friends”. […]

CAP Reform | Postcards From The Future

November 4, 2020 Hannes Lorenzen

The European Commission has initiated the process of building a vision for rural Europe for 2040. But to be genuinely valuable, a visioning exercise should look no further than the near future. ARC2020 president Hannes Lorenzen envisions the next seven years, looking ahead to 2027 before bringing us back to 2021 and the present day. […]

Withdraw the CAP to Safeguard European Green Deal – 27 Organisations

November 2, 2020 Alison Brogan

27 civil society organisations including ARC2020 have co-signed an open letter to the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen calling on the Commission to withdraw its CAP proposal in order to safeguard the European Green Deal. […]

Street Goat: A Blueprint for Urban Agroecology

October 29, 2020 Ursula Billington

Street Goat is a new urban farming project that grazes goats on disused land around the city of Bristol, UK. Run by a 20-member community cooperative, it provides local people with sustainable, healthy milk and meat, while helping to recover overgrown land for horticultural use. Ursula Billington reports. […]

CAP Reform | No Change of System Apparent

October 28, 2020 Sebastian Lakner

Can a cash-strapped EU afford to lock itself into a dysfunctional agricultural policy? In the wake of the new positions on CAP reform agreed by the Council and European Parliament last week, Sebastian Lakner unpacks some crucial elements – and finds a lack of vision, ambition and courage. […]

Building a Long Term Rural Vision with Hannes Lorenzen

October 26, 2020 Hannes Lorenzen

Here Hannes Lorenzen gives his insights into the Commission’s current rural vision process, what led to it, what other processes are driven more by civil society, and how we can all work with the European Green Deal and other initiatives to help rural areas blossom. […]

Regenerative Agriculture part 3 | Working With Nature, Not Suppressing It

October 26, 2020 Peter Dunne

In the third and final installment in this series on regenerative agriculture, Peter Dunne explains how regenerative agriculture is about working with nature, not suppressing it. We’re often told nature and agriculture can’t share the same space. But we urgently need a paradigm shift, because true resilience only comes through diversity. […]

Eco-Scheming | Council Adopts a CAP Position of no Ecological Substance

October 21, 2020 Alison Brogan

After 48 hours of intense debate in Luxembourg, the Council of Minsters agreed its position on the post-2020 CAP package in the early hours of Wednesday morning. This means that once the Parliament reaches its final position Friday, trilogue discussions on the CAP reform can proceed. So what did Europe’s ag minister’s decide on? […]

Parliament Plenary Surgically Removes Green Deal from CAP

October 21, 2020 ARC

This week, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have set a direction for CAP which fundamentally ignores the Commission’s European Green Deal (EGD), and, by extension, the biodiversity and climate crises that led to the EGD. […]

Parliament Plenary – Here’s the Amendments to Vote for and Against

October 19, 2020 ARC

This week is an important one in Europe, with both the Council of Ministers and the Parliament meeting on CAP. MEPs have a plenary vote upcoming later this week . This means the Parliament will adopt an overall, established position for the next stage – trialogue negotiations with Council and Commission. Here we link to all amendments and provide a quick guide to voting for and against certain amendments. […]

Billions for CAP as an “extinction machine” – Farm to Fork Derailed

October 14, 2020 ARC

Next week, likely on October 20, the European parliament will vote on a supposedly historical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for over one third of the EU annual budget. But as it stands, it is rather set to become a historical failure of rather catastrophic proportions. Op-Ed by Nina Holland, Martin Pigeon and Hans van Scharen, researchers at Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) […]

Parliament – Big Three Political Groups Try to Scupper CAP Eco-Schemes

October 13, 2020 ARC

The three biggest groupings in the European Parliament – Renew Europe, the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the European People’s Party (EPP) – have come together to launch an attack on the environment elements of the CAP proposal. […]

Regenerative Agriculture part 2 | A Soils-First Farming & Food Policy

October 13, 2020 Peter Dunne

In the second installment of an exclusive series on regenerative agriculture, Peter Dunne unpacks the rise of agrochemicals and the noxious legacy of the Green Revolution. He argues that regenerative agriculture is a reason for hope, if only we can put soils first in our farming and food policy.
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