Special guest post by Dr. Sebastian Lakner, Research Associate at the Chair for Agricultural Policy at the Georg-August University Göttingen.
Analysis from German finds that Ecological Focus Areas – a core part of the ‘greening’ of the Pillar 1 of the CAP – are having little positive impact on biodiversity. Farmers use the full set of options, but with a strong emphasis on the production options.
Last October, the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture published the press-release No. 191 with the full-dataset on the registration of ‘Ecological Focus Area‘ by farmers in 2015 in Germany. The data mainly confirm the rather low impact of greening and ecological focus area on biodiversity.
![Fallow land in the region of Göttingen, South Lower Saxony](https://slakner.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/img_0936.jpg?w=450&h=600)
Overall, ecological focus area have a share of 11.5% of the total arable land in Germany. As already mentioned in the last post, farmers use the full set of options, but with a strong emphasis on the production options.
Catch crops and under sown crops are the most important options (68%), followed by fallow land (16%) and nitrogen fixing plants (12%). The two interesting options for biodiversity and ecosystem-connectivity, buffer strips and landscape elements have a share of only 3.6% of the ecological focus area.
But to see the full effect for agro-ecosystems, we need to see the share of buffer strips and landscape elements to the sum of arable land, which is 0.42%. This is from a biodiversity perspective simply disappointing. Fallow land might also have a limited positive effect on biodiversity, but strongly depending on the seed-mixture and the location of the fallow land within the region.
Type of Ecological Focus Area | Area in hectares |
Fallow land | 221,8 |
Bufferstrips | 16,5 |
Landscape Elements/ Terraces | 33,0 |
Catch crops / Undersawn crops | 930,2 |
Nitrogen fixing plants | 161,8 |
Short forestry plantation | 2,2 |
Afforestation | 1,9 |
Sum of Ecological Focus Area | 1367,4 |
Source: Ministry for Food and Agriculture, Press-release, 08.10.2015
According to the German Minister for Food and Agriculture, Christian Schmidt (CSU), farmers “create additional environmental services” and it was a good choice, to offer multiple options for farmers. I think, this is a quite optimistic view, but of course subject to a debate on the topic.
From my perspective, the analyses and statements done it the my previous blog-posts are mainly confirmed. The implementation of greening and the ecological focus area are disappointing from a biodiversities point of view. If we argue with the efficiency of tax-payers money, the payments in agri-environmental are more efficient to support biodiversity services from farmers.
The actual data on greening bring a lot of arguments to lower the level of direct payments in pillar I. and increase the financial volume of the agri-environmental programs in pillar II. – at least from a scientific point of view and of course from a German perspective.
Special guest post by Dr. Sebastian Lakner, Research Associate at the Chair for Agricultural Policy at the Georg-August University Göttingen. This post originally appeared on Sebastian’s blog.