This week, the German Commission for the Future of Agriculture (ZKL) is calling on political parties to make a decision on how to finance the much-needed transition of agriculture and livestock farming.
Although the authoritative committee of former minister Borchert already came up with substantiated far-reaching recommendations in 2021, the now outgoing government of SPD, Greens and FDP had not included its financing in their coalition agreement.
The first report of the ZKL, drawn up in 2021, is widely seen as a major breakthrough in the development of a broadly supported social vision for future agriculture. Last Friday, the members of the Zukunft Kommission Landwirtschaft unanimously drew up a strategic vision for a sustainable agricultural, environmental and animal protection policy.
The ZKL Commission consists of high-level representatives from the sectors of agriculture, business, environment, nature conservation, consumer and animal protection, development cooperation and science. Its mandate expires on 30 November.
The supplementary final report will be presented in Berlin on Tuesday. In it, the experts make recommendations for new cooperation on ten action areas, which largely further deepen and concretize their first report from 2021.
“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 stagnation and take innovative paths towards a more sustainable future, they emphasized.
But this now requires consistent action and targeted investments in modernization of livestock farming and agriculture. Investments such as the construction of larger stables should be partly paid for by the government. The members of the ZKL call on politicians to make clear agreements on this this time and to set up a political framework for this.
In the now outgoing German coalition, it was mainly the liberal FDP Finance Minister Christian Lindner who opposed higher VAT on food or the introduction of an additional meat tax. The Christian Democratic opposition of CDU/CSU has not yet shown the back of its tongue in recent years about how they intend to pay for the agricultural transition, but they were enthusiastic about many of the recommendations of the ZKL.
It is expected that agricultural policy will play a major role in the German election campaign in the coming months. The CDU/CSU has already said that they will demand the BMEL ministry in a new cabinet, and that they do not want a coalition with the Greens. The Greens in turn will argue that the impasse in German agriculture has mainly been caused by decades of rule by CDU agricultural ministers.