Although the authoritative commission chaired by former minister Borchert already made well-founded and far-reaching recommendations in 2021, the outgoing coalition government of SPD, Greens, and FDP did not include funding for them in their coalition agreement.
The first report from the ZKL, drafted in 2021, is widely regarded as a major breakthrough in developing a broadly supported societal vision for future agriculture. Last Friday, the members of the Zukunft Kommission Landwirtschaft unanimously established a strategic vision for sustainable agricultural, environmental, and animal welfare policy.
The ZKL commission consists of high-ranking representatives from the sectors of agriculture, business, environment, nature conservation, consumer and animal protection, development cooperation, and science. Its mandate expires on November 30.
The supplementary final report will be presented on Tuesday in Berlin. In it, the experts make recommendations for new cooperation in ten areas of action, which largely deepen and specify their initial 2021 report.
“The strategic guidelines and recommendations are a call to politics,” explained ZKL spokespersons Professor Dr. Regina Birner and Professor Dr. Achim Spiller. More than ever, it is important to overcome the current standstill and pursue innovative paths toward a more sustainable future, they emphasized.
But this now requires consistent action and targeted investments in the modernization of livestock and agriculture. Investments such as the construction of more spacious barns should be partly funded by the government. The ZKL members call on politicians to make clear agreements about this time and to establish a political framework for it.
In the outgoing German coalition, it was primarily the liberal FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner who opposed higher VAT on food or the introduction of an extra meat tax. The Christian Democratic opposition of CDU/CSU has not yet revealed how they intend to finance the agricultural transition over recent years but have expressed enthusiasm for many ZKL recommendations.
It is expected that agricultural policy will play a major role in the upcoming German election campaign. CDU/CSU have already stated that they intend to claim the BMEL ministry in a new cabinet and that they do not want a coalition with the Greens. The Greens, in turn, are likely to argue that the stalemate in German agriculture has mainly arisen due to decades of CDU agricultural ministers in office.