ENVIRONMENT-EUROPE: Olive Subsidies Deemed Harmful

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brian Kenety

BRUSSELS, Jun 25 2001 (IPS) - European Union (EU) agricultural ministers are propping up the region’s olive industry at the expense of the environment, say conservation pressure groups World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Birdlife International.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) encourages overproduction and, in the case of the olive, leads to desertification and biodiversity loss, the groups charge.

According to the groups, the ministers’ decision last week to extend the olive subsidy regime has quashed hopes of early CAP reform.

Elizabeth Guttenstien, WWF’s European agriculture policy officer, says the EU’s olive subsidies, which account for seven percent of the Union’s farming budget, are “the classic, discredited type of payment” that encourages overproduction, the over use of water and other forms of environmental degradation, but does little to support employment, small farmers or communities in marginalized areas.

Almost the entire 2,250 million euro (2,025 million US dollar) CAP budget for olives is spent on production subsidies – paying farmers according to the amount of olives they produce – a policy the organisations see as encouraging intensification of production, irrigation and the unsustainable expansion of the sector.

“It is a regime that is crying out to be reformed, but agricultural ministers simply avoid making any commitment to change,” says Guttenstien, calling intensive olive farming a major cause of some of the biggest environmental problems facing Europe today.

EU agricultural ministers agreed in 1998 on the need to reform the olive sector, establishing an interim subsidy regime intended to run until November 2001. Last week, they adopted a proposal extending it until 2003, effectively postponing a decision, on the grounds that comprehensive databases on the olive sector were not available.

Ahead of that meeting, WWF and Birdlife International issued a report, ‘EU Policies for Olive Farming – Unsustainable On All Counts’, outlining “extensive environmental damage” caused by intensive olive farming driven by the EU subsidies.

The WWF’s European Agriculture and Rural Development Team is working for CAP reform in 2002-2004. Olive farming is the first sector targeted by this campaign. The 18-page report was produced as part of a two-year project analysing the environmental and social potential of sustainable olive farming and processing, and the policy instruments required to support it.

Although olives are common in North Africa and the Middle East, and are grown in places such as Australia, Argentina and California, USA, the world’s largest productive areas are in four EU countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Together, these countries produce 80 percent of the world’s olive oil from a total olive area of approximately five million hectares. Two Spanish provinces (Jaén and Córdoba) account for 40 per cent of total world production.

The report says that desertification, habitat loss and soil erosion are highly problematic in all four countries. Up to 80 million tonnes of topsoil is lost every year from olive plantations in the Spanish region of Andalucia alone, it says, while irrigated olive plantations are expanding in areas with serious water shortages, including Crete, Puglia (Italy), and Andalucia.

Soil erosion is one of the most serious and widespread environmental problems in the Mediterranean region, says the WWF/Birdlife International report. Erosion reduces the soil’s productive capacity, making it necessary to use more fertiliser. Topsoil, fertiliser and herbicides are washed into watercourses and water bodies, causing widespread pollution.

Meanwhile, natural habitats and ancient groves are being cleared for intensive plantations in Greece, Portugal and Spain. In particular, habitats for many northern European migratory birds have been rapidly declining since the introduction of production subsidies, says Miguel Naveso, director of Birdlife International’s European Community Office, citing an example from the report.

The use of Mediterranean olive plantations as a food source by very large numbers of migrant passerine birds, both from northern and central Europe and from Africa, is well documented. But where pesticides are used intensively to control parasites, the overall insect population inevitably suffers and the trees’ overall value as a food source for birds is reduced.

EU subsidies “are driving olive farming down the road of desertification and biodiversity loss,” says Naveso.

Payments that reward intensive production should be abolished and replaced with flat rate payments for areas of land cultivated, says Giovanna Pisano, Birdlife International’s agriculture policy officer, thus “removing the incentive to irrigate land and intensify production.”

Until now, farmers have received CAP subsidies regardless of whether they protect or degrade the environment. The report finds this unacceptable. “Farmers should be required to comply with a basic standard of environmental responsibility in return for the public support they receive,” it says, referring to an approach known as ‘cross-compliance’.

The concept of cross-compliance is developing extremely slowly in the EU, says the report, especially compared with countries such as Switzerland and the United States, where measures are applied on a wide scale.

In the United States, for example, farmers cultivating land with a high erosion risk are required to draw up a soil conservation plan in return for the farm subsidies they receive.

The report says that although EU member states have been obliged to implement agri-environment programmes since 1992, very few schemes have been targeted at olive farming, and those that have still fail to address the scale and range of environmental issues affecting the sector.