For farmers across Europe, the summer of 2025 will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. In scenes that have become all too familiar, floods swept away harvests in Lithuania, droughts parched fields across southern Spain, and France battled wildfires of a scale not seen in more than 75 years.
It was against this backdrop that Brussels lit a political fire of its own. At the end of July, the European Commission unveiled a sweeping proposal to overhaul the European Union’s flagship farm programme, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The revamp is pitched as a bid to make the policy more climate-resilient and market-oriented, but it has already drawn fire from farmers’ unions and green groups alike. The former warning of new costs and fewer guarantees, the latter arguing that by cutting dedicated green funding, weakening conditionality, and handing more discretion to member states, the reform risks watering down environmental ambition and making Europe’s farm policy less coherent.
As one of Brussels’ most expensive and politically sensitive policies, the CAP is billed as the guarantor of not just a steady supply of quality food for Europeans, but also of greener fields, thriving villages and postcard-ready rural landscapes.
This article is part of The Parliament's latest policy report, "Feeding Europe: The future of agriculture"
Revamped every seven years, the most recent round of reform ploughs deep into the policy, redirecting billions in subsidies and rewriting rules that will determine not only how Europe farms, but how its landscapes are preserved, how its environment is protected, and how its food reaches tables. The choices made now will set the course of Europe’s food system and rural landscape for the next decade.
The stakes are high. Agriculture accounts for around 10% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, while farmers are also among the first victims of climate change. The European Investment Bank estimates adverse weather currently costs the sector up to €28 billion annually, with climate damage to crops predicted to surge up to two-thirds by 2050.
In that context, the Commission has framed its reform as a balancing act between slashing red tape and meeting sustainability pledges. But environmental experts warn that, with budget cuts and greater powers handed to national governments, the shake-up risks tilting the scales in favour of farmer flexibility at the expense of environmental safeguards.
“Farmers see and feel climate change happening, they’re worried for their future, yet we are focusing on just band-aid after band-aid,” Théo Pacquet, senior policy officer for agriculture and environment at the European Environmental Bureau, told The Parliament.
Budget cuts squeeze farm support
A core part of the issue is, as ever, money — both its size and how it is allocated. Amid mounting geopolitical tensions and growing pressure on the EU’s budget, the CAP has been hit with significant cuts, rising as high as 30% when adjusted for inflation.
The bulk of this slimmed down budget will go to income support for farmers and other mandatory measures, such as payments for young farmers. But crucially, unlike past cycles, the reform includes no dedicated budget line for climate and environment initiatives.
For Pacquet, the risk is that environmental action will have to compete with other priorities for the crumbs of an already stretched budget.
Meanwhile, the CAP's conditionality, which links direct payments for farmers to compliance with environmental standards, has been replaced by a farm stewardship scheme that imposes only minimal environmental and social conditionality requirements Pacquet described this as a much weaker and less ambitious approach.
Farm funds shift to capitals
Complicating matters further is a radical change in the policy’s funding structure. The reform folds farm funding into a new ‘mega’ fund, giving member states considerable discretion over how it is allocated.
While they could theoretically direct funds towards environmental actions, there is little to incentivise them to do so, according to researcher David Baldock, senior fellow at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.
“This is supposed to be about less regulation and more incentives, but everything we look at shows that there's actually an increase in reasons for member states not to spend money on environmental ambition,” he told The Parliament.
Pointing out that environmental and climate goals are missing from the mega-fund’s headline objectives, Baldock called the reform a “clear step backwards in terms of environmental ambition”.
Aid for weak sectors sparks debate
Baldock also criticised the re-introduction of mandatory coupled income support, a form of farm payment tied to the production of a specific agricultural product or sector that needs it most.
The Commission argues this is needed to prop up struggling sectors, such as livestock farming, and support sensitive border areas. But for Ariel Brunner, regional director of Birdlife Europe, this sets agriculture on the “road to disaster”.
“This will lock farmers into unsustainable farming models,” he told The Parliament, warning against the intensification of a “bloated livestock sector that is already collapsing under its own contradictions”.
“Even from a farm economy point of view, it's really the worst type of subsidy you can come up with,” he said.
The ‘common’ in CAP at risk
Other critics stress there is more missing in this proposal than money, with fears the reform drops the ‘C’ in CAP completely.
Under the new proposal, Brussels still holds the purse strings, but member states will design their own national plans based on their own particularities and priorities.
On paper, that allows for a more tailored, localised approach. In practice, it risks creating a patchwork of national agendas with little co-ordination, according to EU farming association Copa-Cogeca.
Calling it a “complete renationalisation” in a statement published online, the association said the very foundation of European agricultural policy is being “undermined and dismantled”. It warned that the change could make it harder to track progress, compare results and maintain a level playing field across the EU’s single market.
Meanwhile, Birdlife’s Brunner warns this also risks a race to the bottom for environmental action as countries compete to water down requirements and keep farmers onside.
“The political signal is that we don't really care about achieving any of the EU objectives,” he said, adding that this risks a “backstabbing competitive spirit” that is “bad for the EU, bad for governance, and obviously bad for the environment”.
CAP reform planted, now Brussels must act
The first seeds of Europe’s next farm policy have been planted. Now, lawmakers face a long road of negotiations as they work toward a compromise over the coming years.
Whether the reformed CAP will strengthen farmers against climate shocks or falter under political compromise remains to be seen. The battle is now on to create a system that delivers both sustenance and resilience in Europe’s fields.
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