Our daily or weekly groceries have become more expensive recently. These price rises are happening – even though the European Union is one of the world’s most food-secure regions – because the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted feed, fertiliser and energy imports, while extreme weather events have led to crop failures. As a result of this confluence of factors, food prices have skyrocketed, hitting lower-income households most harshly. To protect EU citizens, the European Parliament has consistently advocated measures to make the EU depend less on imports and become more resilient to climate change.
The EU’s most powerful tool to address these challenges and ensure our food security is the common agricultural policy (CAP), which has supported the EU’s primary food producers – farmers – for over 60 years. In 2017, EU agricultural policy was thoroughly reformed. The European Parliament played a central role in shaping the new CAP, which was adopted in 2021 and consists of three regulations: on national strategic plans, on financing, management and monitoring; and on the single common organisation of the markets.
Parliament worked to ensure the new CAP rules incentivise a farming system that is greener, fairer, more efficient and better at preventing and mitigating future threats to food security. During long and intense negotiations, Parliament pushed for greater social and environmental commitments tosupport farmers, preserve biodiversity and maintain healthy soils. As a result, the new CAP devotes 35 % of its €95.5 billion budget to fund rural development, and 25 % of direct payments to farmers will aim to encourage sustainable farming and better animal welfare practices.
Members also advocated strongly for small and family farms, ensuring that at least 10 % of the direct payments budget reinforces the support allocated to them. Moreover, thanks to the European Parliament, at least 3 % of the CAP budget must specifically benefit young farmers. Because fairness and efficiency are important to keep farms running, Members pushed for the introduction of social conditionality – making payments dependent on respect for labour standards – and tougher measures to combat fraud, entailing better monitoring of funds.
Parliament also insisted on the creation of an annual €450 million crisis reserve to shield farmers, stabilise markets and protect consumers from future shocks. This mechanism was used for the first time following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, helping to mitigate energy and agricultural supply disruption, and averting a wider food security crisis in the EU. This way, Parliament used its law-making powers to shield farmers and protect consumers from future crises. Parliament’s powers fall broadly into six, often overlapping, domains: law-making, the budget, scrutiny of the executive, external relations, and, to a lesser extent, constitutional affairs and agenda-setting. This graphic shows more examples of areas where Parliament used one or more of its different powers to influence legislation:
For a fuller picture of the European Parliament’s activity over the past five years, take a look at our publication Examples of Parliament’s impact: 2019 to 2024: Illustrating the powers of the European Parliament, from which this case is drawn.
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