Will EU subsidies be enough to encourage greener farming?

Carolyn Lebel in the Ecologist: In 2011, food prices reached an all-time high, pushing millions more people into poverty worldwide and playing a part too in the revolts that spread across the Arab world. The United States meanwhile was grappling with a record number of extreme weather events, including severe flooding in New York and Pennsylvania caused by Tropical Storm Lee. These two strings of events are united by a common figure.

Fifty-five billion.

In dollars, this is how much Arab Spring is estimated to have cost countries like Libya, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen, according to the International Monetary Fund, (IMF). It is also the tally of damages caused by a record number of billion-dollar weather disasters that struck the US last year. But these events are also a sign of times to come. Climate change is fated to bring more severe storms and extreme weather, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), causing disruptions on the global food market and exacerbating the forces that already leave 900 million people hungry around the world.

Founders of the European Union learnt half a century ago what it meant to govern the hungry. Emerging from over a decade of severe food shortages with farmlands ravaged from the war, six countries - Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands - came together to create the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), an ambitious campaign to modernise farms, increase food production, protect the livelihoods of farmers and ultimately secure its own provisions.

Today, the policy carries it’s own hefty €55 billion price tag - a budget that consumes more than 40% of the EU total. But when compared with the fallout from food riots or extreme weather disasters, it could be seen as a worthwhile investment - providing it was designed to help European farmers tackle the immense challenges on the horizon...

A field in Poland, shot by Alina Zienowicz Ala z, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license