The European Environmental Bureau is a federation of over 145 environmental citizens’ organisations based in most EU Member States, most candidate and potential candidate countries as well as in a few neighbouring countries. These organisations range from local and national, to European and international.

EEB’s aim is to protect and improve Europe’s environment and enable its citizens to play a part in achieving that goal, by promoting environmental policy integration and sustainable policies, particularly at EU level.

This 22 page Vision, published in October 2008, puts forward seven objectives for the CAP:

1. Environmental quality: preserve and improve the environmental quality of the farmland and its immediate surroundings.
2. Landscape and biodiversity protection: help preserve and improve agriculture- related landscapes and biodiversity by providing a stable network of relevant biotopes on or alongside farmland.
3. Global food security: ensure a basic and stable level of food production in the EU for its residents, based in principle (in terms of net land use) on self-sufficiency and taking the need for global food security into account.
4. Food quality, safety and transparency: produce socially responsible, environmentally friendly, animal friendly, safe and healthy food in a transparent food chain where the final consumer can trace products to their origin.
5. Resource efficiency: the agricultural sector should contribute to the sustainable use of resources, an increase in resource efficiency and a reduction of the use of land, water, energy and materials.
6. Mitigation and adaptation to climate change: the agricultural sector can play a role, especially in water management, to better cope with extreme precipitation and droughts, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing their uptake and long term storage in soil or plantations.
7. Fair farming income and vital rural communities. Sustainable agriculture should also be socially and economically sustainable.

Four broad groups of policy measures are presented to meet the above objectives:

1. Public money for public goods - "Public payments should be directly linked to the delivery of well-defined public goods, the most important ones being environmental services which go beyond what is legally required under existing EU environmental legislation."
2. Sustainability criteria - "The EU should develop a labelling system which would encourage farmers to incrementally improve their sustainability performance in a way that is visible for consumers."
3. Permanent environmental set aside - "...relying solely on voluntary schemes to protect biodiversity, water and soil is not sufficient, especially in regions with intensive croplands. A mandatory environmental scheme is therefore necessary to capture the environmental benefits from the old set-aside regime..."
4. Strategic reserves - "A system that helps level off extremes [of prices] by buying and selling strategic stocks at market prices, similar to the role of a central bank in financial markets, is one option that could be realised to address this problem [of past policy measures which led to overproduction]."