Brussels heads for a fall fight over limiting subsidies to big farms

The European Commission is trying to limit the amount of money any single farmer can receive in subsidies, putting it at odds with some member countries and large-scale agricultural producers.

This isn’t the first (or second) time that rules limiting payments to large farms — referred to in EU-speak as "capping" and “degressivity” — have been proposed by the Brussels-based executive. Previous attempts have been met with fierce opposition, and even as he announced the new plan, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen anticipated hostility.

Ahead of negotiations that start in earnest this fall with the Council of the EU, which represents the bloc’s 27 member countries, we crunched the numbers on which countries may be most affected by the proposed changes to the CAP in the bloc’s next seven-year fiscal term.

In the 2023 financial year, 20 percent of the EU’s farms received 80 percent of direct payments. The majority of these payments are decoupled area-based payments, meaning that farmers are paid per hectare regardless of what they produce.

This means large-scale farms can benefit from huge payouts.

In order to limit these, the EU’s new proposal would allow member countries to pay farmers anywhere from €130 to €240 on average per hectare. No individual farmer would receive more than €100,000 annually in area-based income support.

While large swathes of funds could be affected by capping and degressivity, the vast majority of farmers in the bloc would not be directly impacted.

Whether the proposal survives wrangling between the Council, Parliament and Commission will become clear as negotiations kick off after the summer.