The agricultural ministers of the German states have officially approved a proposal by federal minister Cem Özdemir to allow the cultivation of productive crops on certain fallow land in light of the war in Ukraine.

According to the decision taken on Tuesday (16 August), farmers may continue to grow cereals, sunflowers or certain legumes for one year on land that they would otherwise have been obliged to take out of production under the reformed EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which will start being applied by EU member states from January 2023.

Contrary to Özdemir’s original position, Germany is thus partially implementing the derogation proposed by the EU Commission at the end of July, which allows member states to relax certain environmental requirements within the CAP in light of the impact of the Ukraine war on global grain markets.

This includes the so-called good agricultural and environmental conditions (GAEC) 8 standard, which as of 2023 requires farmers to leave a certain proportion of farmland – 4% in Germany – fallow in order to improve biodiversity.

Özdemir had initially been critical of the Commission’s proposed relaxation, which aims to increase domestic grain production in light of reduced supplies from Ukraine while accusing the EU executive of avoiding responsibility over the global food crisis.

However, many regional ministers, including the current chairman of the Conference of Agriculture Ministers, Saxony-Anhalt’s agriculture minister Sven Schulze of the Christian-democrats party (CDU), had called to fully implement the relaxation allowed by the EU executive.

At their most recent meeting at the end of July, the federal and state governments, therefore, failed to reach an agreement on the matter.

Agreement ‘overdue’

Tuesday’s decision by the ministers is based on a compromise proposal that Özdemir submitted to the states on August 6, and with which he largely caved into the regions: while existing fallow land will continue to be protected, farmers will not have to take additional land out of production for the time being.

“What I am presenting is a compromise that hurts in one place or another,” Özdemir explained after the announcement of his proposal.

At the same time, a full implementation of the Commission’s recommendations “one to one” was ultimately “not consensus among the federal government and the states,” Schulze said in a statement on Tuesday regarding the decision of the ministers.

Nevertheless, the Christian-democrat politician welcomed the unanimous decision of the federal and state ministers, which he said was “long overdue”. In this way, he said, Germany was making “an important contribution to global food security” and setting “a sign of solidarity in times of scarce resources”.

The German Farmers’ Association had also called Özdemir’s proposal “overdue” after its publication and called for quick approval by the 16 federal states since farmers had already started with the cultivation planning for the coming year.

Criticism of the decision to cultivate fallow land, meanwhile, came from environmental associations.

The conservationist NGO NABU, for example, described Özdemir’s decision as “evidence of incapacity for German agricultural policy” in a statement. It is “completely incomprehensible” why fallow land with “low yield potential should give way to the cultivation of grain,” explained the organization’s president, Jörg-Andreas Krüger.

Crop rotation: more wheat cultivation possible in 2023

In addition to the relaxed rules on fallow land, the German federal states also agreed on the less contested proposal to suspend crop rotation requirements for the period of one year, with the aim is to increase domestic wheat production.

Under the new CAP rules, European farmers cannot grow the same crop two years in a row if they want to get access to the funds available at the conditions set out in the new green architecture of the EU’s farming subsidies programme.

For example, if a field was planted with winter wheat in one year, corn, rapeseed or similar crops would have to be grown instead in the following year.

The suspension of the rule for 2023 is now set to enable farmers to plant the highly-demanded crop again next year, even on fields that have already been used for wheat this year.

Back in May, Özdemir himself had called on the Commission to allow EU member states to suspend the crop rotation rules and accordingly included this in his proposal for German implementation.

Source: Euractiv.com