Taxonomy and agriculture, the latest bureaucratic madness

This issue, which has its origins in the Paris Climate Agreement, had gone under the radar because it gave the impression of a theoretical exercise with no real link to the concrete. The general idea of the Taxonomy is to reserve investments and therefore financing for products in line with the objective of carbon neutrality in 2050. A laudable objective, but one that was prepared by a team of
bureaucrats and is not based on any impact study, just as the Green Deal itself is devoid of any. In the annexes to the draft delegated act of the Commission, one notes throughout the 700 pages (!) a flagrant lack of scientific rigor and a failure to take into account technical progress, as if carbon neutrality were to be achieved “all other things being equal”. Agriculture was absent from the preparatory work and also absent from the Group of Experts convened by the Commission and it is with astonishment that we discover a kind of supervision of agriculture, forestry, bio-fuels and primary processing industries by a whole series of a priori non-binding measures that will in reality frame our production activities. Agriculture is thus threatened by a layer of complexity and constraints that go beyond the recently negotiated CAP provisions, the ink on which is barely dry. This also applies to biofuels, whose environmental profile does not seem to correspond to the decline trajectory desired by the Green Deal. The draft delegated act has just been the subject of a public consultation to which we have responded. Will the Commission take it into account? Or will it adopt its delegated act? If so, we will have to mobilize to convince the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament to veto such a proposal.