Reacción a "Reactions: Analysis of 2013 data estimates that most CAP funds go to emissions-intensive animal production"

It was a relatively well-known fact that European agriculture was not based on the environmentally and socially sustainable production of healthy and affordable food for European citizens. This was the original objective of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the first fully common European policy, which has managed a large part of the European budget since its inception. Successive reforms, focused on decreasing production by compensating farmers' income losses through subsidies, have proved ineffective in this regard, as neither farm incomes have become more balanced (less than 20% of CAP funds reach the majority of farmers, while 80% go to large landowners and the agri-food industry) nor have environmental problems decreased, quite the contrary.  

The results of this paper clearly highlight this reality, focusing this time on analysing how CAP funds flow through the market to their final destination. The results are as solid and clear as they are devastating: more than 80% of CAP funds, which come from European citizens' taxes, end up financing the meat industry, and not precisely that based on extensive livestock farming, of great environmental and social value through the maintenance of traditional pastures and agro-livestock landscapes, but intensive farming, based on industrial macro-farms, as reflected in the fact that most of this subsidy is indirect through subsidies for the production of feed for livestock.  

The paper has only been able to analyse data up to 2013 (unfortunately, updated data is missing), so it has not been able to address the potential effect of the last two CAP reforms, both aimed at reducing the importance of direct payments based on past production and area and number of heads managed (Pillar I), which is the ultimate cause of the result of this paper (80% of subsidies end up in agribusiness, which bases its business on macro-farms).  

The previous reform introduced Pillar I green payments, which financed supposedly environmentally beneficial practices, and the current reform imposes the need to set social and environmental objectives that must be directly assessed. Green payments have proven to be ineffective due to their low ambition (Concepción et al. 2020, Pe'er et al. 2022), while the Green Architecture of the current CAP is continually being pushed downwards by the agribusiness industry with any conjunctural excuse, such as the war in Ukraine (Morales et al. 2022) or the drought and its effects on farmers' incomes, the basis of the demonstrations of the last few weeks.  

Let us hope that the results of this work put the focus in the right place to direct the huge CAP funds to their declared objectives: once food sovereignty has been achieved, the negative effects of the CAP on the environment (pollution, loss of biodiversity) and rural societies (rural abandonment, speculation, inequality; Díaz et al. 2021) must be reversed.