EU budget reform key to conservation
Vicky Phillips, Guardian News Service, London
When European leaders meet today at Hampton Court, one issue will cast a shadow over all other proceedings: The crisis surrounding the EU's next budget, worth about 130 billion euro a year. What is decided will have profound implications for Europe's environment and wildlife.
European financing programs -- particularly the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) -- have historically put food and economic production ahead of environmental protection. Recent CAP reforms took an important step forward by severing the link between subsidies and production, and by starting to reward farmers for more sustainable land management. But much more needs to be done to ensure that funds from Brussels help, rather than hinder, the EU's environmental ambitions.
Nowhere is this more vital than in the new member states of central and eastern Europe, which have some magnificent wildlife sites, such as the Biebrza marshes in Poland and the stunning mountains of Triglav in Slovenia. These countries are home to large numbers of globally threatened birds, such as the great bustard, imperial eagle and aquatic warbler, and are set to benefit from significant amounts of EU aid.
Nature conservation benefits local economies, health and education and is fundamental for a good quality of life, but unless EU funds encourage farmers, governments and local authorities to look after the land in a way that benefits wildlife, we risk losing that and Europe's most precious natural heritage.
Ironically, it is that part of the EU budget that helps improve the environment that is most at risk if the six most powerful states, including the UK, force through their demands for an overall budget cut. This is because, in 2002, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder brokered a deal to fix farm subsidies under the CAP at around a third of the EU's budget until 2013. This agreement means that if savings have to be made, other pots will have to be raided.
Most at risk is the EU's rural development program, which funds measures to boost rural economies and wildlife on farms. It was expected that this budget line would play a major role in financing the official network of EU-protected wildlife sites, known as Natura 2000. But if these funds are sacrificed to balance the EU's books, then Natura 2000 funding may be cut and schemes to reverse declines in farmland wildlife will falter.
Only by securing far-reaching reform of the CAP to deliver public benefits from taxpayers' money and by safeguarding rural development and environment budgets -- as well as integrating the environment into all EU financing policies -- can Tony Blair deliver an EU budget fit for the 21st century.
The writer is EU institutions manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.