As a contribution to the debate on the design of the future CAP, IEEP has produced a paper that sets out a series of conditions that the European Commission’s proposals for ‘greening’ Pillar 1 need to meet if a substantive ‘greening’ is to be achieved in practice in order to deliver their objective of improving environmental outcomes across most of the EU farmed landscape.

The Commission College debated for a long day before agreeing their proposals for the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF) late on Wednesday evening. The CAP (€372 billion) remains a sizeable element of the Budget but now accounts for a fractionally smaller share of the overall MFF cake than the Cohesion Policy (€376 billion). The two Pillars remain and the basic structure of the CAP is not radically altered although the formal objectives now reflect the priorities of Europe 2020 much more explicitly. Indeed promoting resource efficiency has pride of place in the new objectives along with 'smart, sustainable and inclusive growth'.