Editorial: National Strategic Plans, a democratic denial

The Commission must be recognised as having a great talent for taking full advantage of the guerrilla war for power that the European institutions are waging. This is demonstrated every day with the delegated acts and, very recently, with the taxonomy, the latest avatar of Community policies. The implementation of the National Strategic Plans offers us a new example. Officially, the Commission’s aim is to “help” the Member States to support the implementation of the CAP, with the ulterior motive of “raising” the Union’s environmental ambition. In reality, the Commission intends to recover what it had to give up to the co-legislators during the negotiations leading to the CAP reform applicable
in 2023. The Commission intends to deepen the ideological vision it promotes in its Green Deal and its “Farm to Fork” project. Far from “helping” the Member States, the Commission is trying to put
pressure on them. Worse, it is playing them off against each other. As if the decisions of the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament did not count. BCAE7 is a typical example of this, with the desire to impose plot-based rotation on everyone, even though this was amended in the trialogue. But this is not the worst thing when we see the situation of Dutch farmers in the middle of a conflict against the reduction of nitrogen emissions that the Commission is pushing for. Unfortunately, in this context, it seems that our natural interlocutors in DG Agri are struggling to come up with a new, realistic ambition for European agriculture, in the face of the demands of DG ENVI, DG GROW
or DG SANTE, depending on the case. Yet the climate emergency and the necessary return to a form of food and energy sovereignty make this necessary!