After months of intense negotiations between Member States and the Commission, the first nine Rural Development Programmes (RDP) for 2014-2020 were adopted last week. Plans were adopted in Denmark, Poland, Austria, Finland, Portugal, and Germany.

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However, conservation groups have expressed reservations over the direction of rural development in the EU. On Friday (19 December), BirdLife Europe and the European Environmental Bureau – both of whom have been actively involved in the process of developing new CAP plans – welcomed "limited improvements" to the approved plans, but stressed that the overall policy landscape is still worrying.

The groups said that, at present, much more work needs to be done both by the Commission and Member States to make the remaining programmes beneficial to the environment. Since the policy agreements were brokered last year, two major UK studies have reached damning conclusions about the new CAP, which was billed as being greener and fairer.

Last July, researchers from the University of East Anglia who contributed to the National Ecological Assessment in 2011 found that CAP spending represents poor value for society and the environment. In June this year, experts at the University of Cambridge (who worked with partners across the EU) found that EU authorities had failed to deliver promises of a greener agriculture policy, and that environment provisions have been "So diluted they will be of no benefit to European wildlife, and biodiversity will continue to decline across the continent."   

As the negotiation process between the Commission and the Member States led to an effective renationalization of many aspects of the CAP, there is now a degree of variety in how the Rural Development Programmes will work. Austria will devote more RDP budget to supporting biodiversity-friendly management than was previously the case (despite now having a smaller total budget). On the other hand, countries like Poland, Finland and Portugal have included some well- designed biodiversity schemes in their proposals, according to EEB, but their budgets are again far too small to make a difference for habitats and species in dire need of support.

EEB was even more scathing of the German RDPs (four different programmes were adopted last week in Germany), which the conservation group said represent "An outdated business as usual approach with… far too little money invested in target-oriented agri-environment measures."

Denmark's adopted plan has been altered to provide greater provision for farmland birds than the original proposal submitted to the Commission.

Birdlife agriculture spokesperson Trees Robijns said on Friday, "While the Commission has clearly requested that Member States take the environment into account, not all of their RDPs reflect that equally. Too many Member States have done far from enough to shift money towards the protection of ecosystems, investments which are necessary to ensure the long term future of our farming. This flies in the face of the overall objective of the reform which was to focus on the sustainable management of natural resources."

EEB Senior Policy Officer Faustine Defossez added, "It is too early to judge how these plans will affect our countryside. But all the indications show that the new generation of Rural Development Programmes will fall short of what is needed to reverse the deepening environmental crisis. After greenwashing of the first pillar, Rural Development looks set to suffer the same fate. With all this, more and more imminent questions arise about what benefits society gets for all the money invested in CAP."