Following voting by members of the European Parliament Agriculture Committee last week, politicians on both sides of the political divide have reacted strongly to reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy as they currently stand.

Committee members voted to distribute CAP funding more evenly, capping payments to the largest recipients and reducing disparity between payment levels in different member states, but also hobbled 'greening' measures proposed by the Commission in a bid to make European farming more environmentally friendly.

In the wake of Agriculture Committee voting, parliamentarians reacted particularly strongly to moves which they said amounted to funding farmers twice for carrying out the same work. If passed in wider parliament voting, the double funding would contravene EU law.

The 'double funding' issue is related to environment measures being introduced as part of the reforms. Although the committee weakened the 'greening' element of reform proposals, which would see farmers being paid for undertaking environmentally beneficial measures as part of their single payment, it also said farmers in agri-environment schemes receiving fundnig under CAP pillar 2 should be entitled to keep their extra payments. The commitments associated with these schemes vary across the EU and farmers would effectively be receiving funding twice without having any additional commitments in some cases.

Although she condemned the Committee agreements as "bad on every level", Conservative MEP and Agriculture Committee member Julie Girling attempted to defend her colleagues. She said, "The process in Parliament is extremely complicated. We are voting on a series of elaborate compromises which contain many elements each – so it may well be that at the end of the day we will have voted for double payments. If that's the case we will have to get it taken out at a later stage."

On Thursday, UK environment secretary Owen Paterson hit out at the Committee, declaring that passing double funding is "wrong, given the current economic circumstances". Conservatives in the UK want to see CAP funding and the EU budget cut by as much as possible; as part of their drive to drastically reduce support payments to farmers, UK Conservatives have been especially scathing of the 'double funding' measures.

Also commenting on the double funding issue, Tony Long, director WWF Europe's Policy Office, said, "Not only is it illegal under EU law, but it will mean that billions of euros a year could be taken away from environmental programmes that are already suffering from budgets cuts."

He added, "The loss will be directly felt by the environment, as farming will carry on with business as usual while squandering chances to tackle problems like climate change and the loss of biodiversity. It is shameful that center-right political groups have created a legal loophole for double funding based apparently because of self-interest."

Green issues

Mr Long also lamented the lack of protection for greening measures, which he said were inadequate to begin with. He said the committee "Will need to show that its regressive positions on CAP reform are not influenced by the short-term commercial interests of the farming and food industries and by its own composition which is heavily skewed towards past farm union officials and farmers," adding that, "The agri-food lobby is known to outspend all other stakeholders by a ratio of 4-1 when lobbying the EU, and they remain very influential in the Parliament."

Echoing WWF's stance, German MEP and Green agriculture spokesperson Martin Häuslingsaid, "The proposals for 'greening' the CAP are little more than greenwash. The plans are voluntary and riddled with exemptions, so they will clearly fail to fundamentally shift EU agriculture to a sustainable path. Instead of real crop rotation with legumes, which is a win-win-win for the environment, fertility and lowering farmers' costly dependency on chemicals and rainforest-destroying soya imports, the CAP will promote weaker crop 'diversification'. Proposals on double-funding, whereby farmers would get paid twice to do the same thing, are unacceptable at a time of budget wrangling and public austerity. Scandalously, MEPs even voted against full transparency of how the CAP budget is distributed."  

Agricultural spending accounts for about 40 percent of the European Union's annual budget. Of this, 69 percent of CAP spending goes on direct payments. This makes CAP an acutely controversial area of policy and one that will surely suffer if the European budget is cut.

The Agriculture Committee reforms will go before the full parliament in March, just nine months before they are due to be implemented, though due to delays in CAP and EU budget negotiations, this now looks almost impossible.