First year of EU’s CAP reforms created unprecedented space for nature in Slovakia

Almost 7,000 kilometres of non-productive areas – four times the length of Slovakia’s national borders – have been created in Slovakia since the start of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform.

From 2023, Slovak farmers can participate in a new subsidy, the so-called eco-scheme, a conditional aid designed to encourage farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices. This includes practices such as improving soil structure, setting aside unproductive areas and sowing them with pollinator mixtures, and limiting the maximum area of land cultivated.

Before their launch, there were doubts about whether there would be interest among farmers in the new subsidy. Eco-scheme entails new costs and lower incomes caused by the loss of part of their production.

But the preliminary figures, which the Agriculture Ministry told EURACTIV Slovakia, exceeded all expectations.

Of all the 16,468 farms in the EU subsidy system, 8,809 (or more than half) were involved in the eco scheme. The Ministry expects the eco-scheme to cover at least 70% of the area for which farmers can claim direct hectare subsidies.

The most controversial condition was the division of large monoculture areas by margin fields with grasses and forbs. Slovakia has the largest average area of fields sown with a single crop.

In the first year of the CAP reform, farmers created 7,518 such margins covering 8,188 hectares, 32 times more than in the whole of the previous seven-year subsidy period.

The result also surprised the environmentalists who were involved in the preparation of the eco scheme. “It’s definitely more than we expected. We have to thank all the companies for getting involved, even though it is a new and very complicated scheme,” said Jozef Ridzoň from the Slovak Ornithological Society/Birdlife Slovakia.

(Marián Koreň | EURACTIV.sk)