Ireland’s Maynooth University hosted the 2018 Festival of Food Sovereignty mid-April. The intention was to connect activists, scholars, practitioners and social movements from around the world interested in creating a food system rooted in principles of justice, ethical production and consumption, sustainability and democracy. […]
How can biodiversity loss and ecosystem services be valued? What are the implications of putting a monetary value on nature? Ian Fitzpatrick investigates current research on ecosystem service valuation. […]
what amounts to a mini CAP reform has just passed a crucial stage towards becoming law. There is but a single plenary (all MEPs) vote in the Parliament left, most likely in December. So what was agreed and what does it mean?
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Three quarters of all flying insects in Germany have disappeared in just 27 years, according to a study published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals, PLoS One. What are the details are what may be to blame? […]
Four new policy instruments have been proposed by the EEB – the European Environmental Bureau – for a future CAP. These instruments are put forward for use in the areas of ecosystems, rural development, healthy food and sustainable farming. […]
How can farmers, researchers and administrators work together to really preserve mountain grasslands, which are threatened with scrub encroachment and land abandonment? Dr. Ika Darnhofer outlines some findings from a recent paper Darnhofer and colleagues published. […]
Catch crops (68%), fallow land (16.2%) and nitrogen fixing crops (11.8%) dominated ecological focus areas (EFAs) in Germany in 2015. Why is this? What influences farmers’ decisions on EFAs? One of the authors of a new peer reviewed publication on this topic, ARC2020 regular Sebastian Lackner, summarises the paper, in which he and colleagues interviewed a range of experts on the matter. […]
Using a recent document by the Commission on Ecological Focus Areas – EFAs – this long read traces the story of The Common Agriculture Policy’s EFAs. EFAs are up for discussion and consideration once again, as current Commissioner Phil Hogan seems intent on banning pesticides from these areas. They may, after all, emerge as a way to protect biodiversity and the ecosystem and agri services nature provides. In four parts. […]
Sebastian Lanker and Rainer Oppermann explain how CAP is failing environmentally, before outlining specific budget neutral proposals, including for sustainability and agri-nature payments. […]
In David Attenborough’s foreword to The State of Nature 2016, he writes: “…Nature is in serious trouble and it needs our help as never before.” The report singles out intensive agriculture and climate change as the two most serious threats to biodiversity in the UK. Agriculture still occupies 75% of the UK’s land area and the declining fortunes of mixed farming has led to consolidation and specialisation on a massive scale at landscape level. It is hardly surprising then, that the environmental impact of farming should be an issue of public concern. Look at this picture of a field with an over-wintered crop above: it is typical of thousands up and down the UK. Beneath the serried ranks of seedlings, criss-crossed with tracks that reflect the width of the spraying boom which passes periodically, countless farmland species struggle to adapt to what is often a hostile environment. The State of Nature editorial team identify earlier planting and regular spraying as important underlying factors in the way intensive farming impacts biodiversity. The study draws on long […]
Part two of a two part series on mechanical and other non-chemical weed management techniques. By Oliver Moore […]
Our most environmentally valuable farmland is condemned to a slow death by a combination of EU bureaucracy and national decisions. CAP’s so called greening ties up farmers in bureaucracy, uses valuable public money and still fails to protect nature or the incomes of farmers in marginalised areas adequately. There are however solutions. […]
Participatory seed saving techniques are given a welcome boost in Romania, with the 2015 Eco Ruralis seed catalogue […]
Traditional orchards across the Carpathian Basin are restoring agrobiodiversity and rural livelihoods. Stella Beghini of Eco Ruralis reports. […]
Deforestation and beef exports […]
Agricultural and Rural Convention