This reflection paper aims to investigate to what extent risk management tools offered within the current rural development policy can encourage farmers to combine economic and environmental sustainability, inspired by the Fondo Risemina Maize - a risk management tool assisting adoption of Integrated Pest Management (IPM).
Within the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) it is mainly the rural development policy, which compensates farmers economically for the adoption of integrated pest management (IPM)1 . One of the key arguments against IPM is the higher level of risk taken by the farmer during the transition towards more sustainable systems. While the rural development policy does allow Member States to offer farmers financial support to assist farmers in the move towards real IPM, this potential is not being exploited to the full in the CAP.
The subsidiary principle applied to EU’s Rural Development Policy (RDP) means that it is, within certain limits, for the Member States to decide which measures of the rural development policy to apply. Member States can offer risk insurances of crop, animal and plants; and can also establish mutual funds - by using up to 3.5% of the national direct payment envelopes - to compensate farmers for ‘losses due to adverse climatic events, the outbreak of animal or plant diseases, pest infestation or environmental incidents or to eradicate or contain a plant disease or pest’.
The European Union has been slow in developing joint risk-management tools, crisis and disaster management and some Member States have developed national schemes financed by state aid. In the current CAP, 13 Member States have decided to offer risk-management tools to farmers, and a spending of 1.7% of the total RDP is reserved for this measure. However, very few Member States, if any, seem to consider that risk-management tools could be used to assist the farmers financially helping them to confront potential risks when moving towards IPM.
So far, PAN Europe has only identified one interesting crop risk-management model, Fondo Risemina Mais, developed in 2014 by a group of maize farmers in Veneto Italy, covering 53.000 hectares able to ensure both environment and economic sustainability.