With a letter to Commission President van der Leyen, conservative MPs want to soften EU standards for agriculture. Two of the seven conservative EU parliamentarians from Austria have also signed.
“We hereby call on you to work with us to ensure the suspension of crop rotation and, above all, the set-aside of four percent of agricultural land within the framework of the Common European Agricultural Policy for the years 2024 and 2025.” That is one of the core sentences of a March 29th Letter to the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen.
Set aside and crop rotation have been introduced to boost biodiversity. Monocultures and intensive agriculture have greatly increased biodiversity in recent decades – on the one hand through the use of pesticides, on the other hand through the loss of habitats of endangered animal and plant species. The set-aside also gives the field a breather to prevent the soil from being completely leached out.
The letter is carried by 27 conservatives, mostly CDU and CSU MPs, an EU parliamentarian from South Tyrol and two Austrian mandaters, whose political home is the ÖVP. The claim is justified with the war in Ukraine. It is necessary “that Europe and our agriculture contribute to alleviating the situation.”