Dear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen,
European Coordination Via Campesina and IFOAM Organics Europe both represent farmers who preserve
the diversity of our countryside and put high quality and sustainable food on the table of Europeans. Both
organisations take part in the strategic dialogue on the future of agriculture and write to you today about
the Commission’s proposal on CAP simplification rules.
We hereby declare that, while reducing administrative burdens for farmers is necessary, this must not
result in lower environmental ambitions and further exacerbating the impact of climate change and of the
biodiversity collapse that farmers already witness. On the contrary, any revision of European legislation
should strengthen and protect the most sustainable, organic and agroecological models of agriculture and
prepare the necessary transition of the European agri-food system. The proposed simplification rules will
ultimately only exacerbate discontent in the farming community as they neither support farmers in
increasing their resilience nor do they address the real issues that farmers face, which is the lack of fair
prices for their products and lack of a decent income. To enable the adoption of sustainability practices
on farms it is necessary to ensure fair prices to farmers, that at least cover their production costs and
remunerate them for the public goods they deliver. We believe that this is not a contradiction with high
environmental ambitions for farmers within the CAP.
The CAP should regulate markets and ensure fair and stable prices, protected from speculation. We
welcome the announcements of measures to strengthen the position of farmers in the value chain such
as the observatory of prices, costs and margins, the possible modification of the Unfair Trading Practices
Directive as well as the measures contained in the Common Market Organisation Regulations. These
proposals must now be made more precise and concrete to allow their effective implementation.
Moreover, CAP support should be distributed fairly and promote a true transition towards organic and
other sustainable and agroecological practices by providing a real comparative advantage to farmers
engaged in sustainable methods of production such as organic farming.
We also raised these points during the short consultation period that preceded the publication of the CAP
simplification rules, but most of them were not considered. We represent 50% of the farming
organisations that were consulted, but almost none of our concerns are reflected in the final output. We
are deeply concerned that our participation in the consultation is used to legitimize the process and
proposal on CAP simplification, which will mostly result in lowering the environmental delivery of the CAP,
and ultimately, its legitimacy.
Indeed, this simplification process would result in a significant change of the CAP measures, so
considerable that it could be compared to a small CAP reform. However, neither the necessary impact
assessment, nor an adequate, time-sufficient consultation that should accompany such a reform have
been carried out. The Commission must act fast to address farmers’ difficulties, but the process that led
to the CAP simplification proposed rules required more representative and integrative democratic
procedures.
As organizations representing farmers and committed to their well-being, as well as that of consumers
and the environment, we urge the Commission, to ensure that CAP simplification rules and any actions
taken are in line with achieving environmental, economic and social sustainability in the European food
and farming system.
We would appreciate having the chance to further address the above-mentioned issues and potential
solutions in a meeting at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Andoni Garcia and Morgan Ody for the Coordinating Committee of ECVC
Jan Plagge, IFOAM Organics Europe, President

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Brussels, 5 March 2024

Dear European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen,

We are writing to you as a group of stakeholders, united by our concern for healthy

freshwater and marine ecosystems, to express our regret at the decision to delay the EU Communication on water resilience.

In the face of more intense and frequent extreme weather events related to climate change, the EU should accelerate its action to address recurrent water scarcity and protect society against the effects of droughts, floods, wildfires and sea level rise. All Europeans should be ensured of their basic right to clean and healthy water. We are convinced that achieving water resilience through nature based solutions should be a political priority under the next European Commission, with healthy freshwater and marine ecosystems – rivers, lakes, wetlands, deltas and coastal areas – at its core. We therefore call on you to launch the communication on the EU’s Water Resilience Initiative before the 2024 European elections as set out in the European Commission Work programme for 2024.

Europeans are increasingly concerned about water and climate – and rightly so. We have just experienced the second warmest year ever in Europe. From floods to droughts, sea level rise and wildfires, water-related phenomena and extreme weather events driven by a rapidly changing climate are becoming increasingly severe and frequent, creating major impacts on the health and safety of people, on ecosystems, and on the economy, and critically affecting cities and regions.

These events and their indirect consequences tend to affect the most vulnerable groups and activities disproportionally, such as low-income groups who are often more exposed to climate risks, workers whose jobs depend on natural resources, such as farmers and fishers, or the elderly who are often harder hit by the health effects of climate change, such as heat waves.

Climate change is aggravating the pressures that human activities already inflict on water resources and freshwater ecosystems, such as land-use change and habitat loss, pollution, and over-abstraction of water. While existing EU policies and legislation, such as the EU Water Framework Directive, Floods Directive, and Marine Strategy Framework Directive, as well as the EU Biodiversity Strategy are well designed to address the mismanagement of water resources and the protection and restoration of freshwater and marine ecosystems, they are poorly implemented, under-funded and barely enforced.

Additional EU action is urgently needed to make Europe water resilient and better protect its citizens against the predictable and devastating effects of climate change. The Initiative for Water Resilience, announced as one of your three priorities under the European Green Deal for 2024, received positive feedback from a large number of Member States2 and stakeholders3, and has created expectations for a more sustainable use of water resources, including in cities and regions.

Any further delay in launching the Initiative, including its consultation and communication actions, would send a very wrong signal to citizens, farmers, industry, cities, the tourism sector and water suppliers, while also negatively impacting nature. It would signal that addressing climate resilience can wait, when climate change is already hitting hard.

Water resilience must come from maintaining and enhancing the many services healthy and resilient ecosystems provide, such as wetlands which naturally absorb, filter and store water and provide natural buffers against floods and droughts, diverse forests which support the water cycle, deltas which maintain the balance between salty and freshwater conditions, or agricultural systems under organic and agroecological farming which protect water bodies from contaminants, reduce leaching and enhance the ability of the soil to retain water. The services provided by freshwater ecosystems alone are worth over €11 trillion in Europe – around 2.5 times the GDP of Germany, while considerable health and recreational benefits such as angling, come on top. Climate

adaptation solutions should not come at the cost of ecosystem degradation, and should avoid locking in water- and energy-intensive practices, without increasing inequalities in water access.

This is why nature-based solutions should be prioritised over building new water reservoirs, water transfers or desalination plants.We need more nature, not less, to address the interrelated triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

We also need to move towards a more responsible and equitable use of our water resources. For decades, we have been extracting unsustainable amounts of water in many regions of the continent, as if unlimited water would be available forever. The EU needs to create a framework for transitioning towards a more sustainable use of water for all sectors and citizens, which leaves enough clean water in ecosystems and enables decision-makers and economic actors to plan the necessary investments and ensure that this transition is fair.

We therefore hope that the Initiative for Water Resilience can:

● Pave the way for making nature-based water resilience a priority in the next

legislative mandate;

● Prioritise the deployment of nature-based solutions for water resilience over infrastructure and engineering works and ensure adequate funding from public and private sources;

● Support a reduction in water demand in water-stressed areas in all sectors at a local and regional level, in order to provide long term investment certainty to European citizens and industries, and to enable the multi-stakeholder planning needed for building resilience in a just way;

● Accelerate the implementation and enforcement of the current and upcoming legislation, in particular the EU Water Framework Directive and its daughter directives; the Marine Strategy Framework Directive; the Maritime Spatial Planning Directive; and the EU Nature Restoration Law.

We remain at your disposal for further discussion.

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By failing to adopt an ambitious pesticide reduction law, the EU institutions betray more than a million citizens across Europe who expressed the pressing need to reduce pesticides, and to support farmers in doing so, through the ECI Save Bees and Farmers. Their demands deserve an answer, the next generations as well. Instead, what citizens have received is increased health and environmental risks and no commitment to sustainability, thus undermining the credibility of EU institutions.

The Commission decision to withdraw the SUR should not be presented as a ‘gift’ to farmers. It will only keep them trapped into the pesticide merry-go-round, further locking farming in unsustainable practices that impact farmers’ health, that of workers and citizens. Right from the outset, it was the pesticide and wider agribusiness industry – corporations that make big profits on the backs of farmers – who launched attacks on the Green Deal, Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategy.

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