‘Holding discussions only internally, without involving the rest of civil society, will sink instead of save this policy. Different NGOs offered the CAP a future, something that we could defend together: let the policy deliver public goods to society, because in the end it is public money going to it. But if some people think that they can just use the name of public goods without any green content, we cannot support them. We need a deep greening of the policy that delivers for the environment and for farmers. A policy that includes a serious greening package of mandatory measures at farm level in the first pillar and that includes a second pillar which helps to strengthen the first pillar potential. We hope that in the future, we can have better debates on the content, that will not make us waste half our time on the format of a meeting, but rather on the proposals on the table.’
Statement from Birdlife International, 25th November 2011
