Mr. Timmermans: the countryside is not your private garden

With a very tight result and after enormous uncertainty in the days prior to the vote, the European Parliament has rejected the Nature Restoration Law project in committee. The parliamentary path is complicating for a controversial regulation from its roots that has caused significant tensions between political groups less than a year before the next European elections. These frictions will be evident again in two weeks, foreseeably between July 11 and 13, when the project will be voted in the Strasbourg plenary session.

Apart from the political discussions, there are two fundamentally wrong elements in this project. On the one hand, it misdiagnoses how to restore nature and what to do to restore it. To achieve its objective, it uses a single path: the growth of forest masses, without specifying what type of growth is desired, with what qualities and how to make it compatible with arable areas. If something is non-existent in Europe, it is deforestation, and even less to leave land free for agricultural use. Quite the opposite. The indisputable fact is that forest masses grown uninterruptedly in Europe for decades: 9% since 1990. More impressive is the figure for Spain: 35% in the same period. What are we talking about then? It seems that a reflexion as simple as this has not been done in any of the stages of the processing of this legislative project.

And, on the other hand, it does not correctly focus on where the real risks of biodiversity loss are, inherent to the mismanagement of both green areas in general and protected areas in particular. The Commission puts all the emphasis on quantitative objectives that are difficult to achieve, and that at the same time are sefl-defeating, putting the “quantity” before the “quality” of the environment. For example, the law establishes an objective: to cover 10% of the agricultural territory with vegetation that supports diversity. Since there is no more land than what there is, it would force the reconversion of some arable land into mountains or vegetation.

Franz Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission, wants to turn a good part of the European territory into a wild garden. He knows it well, but in his now-rejected project, an irrational green ideology prevails over technical criteria and rationality. From the Institut Agrícola we are not opposed to a plan for the conservation and empowerment of nature, absolutely not. A successful plan is precisely one that promotes management, invests in the efficiency of carbon capture from the atmosphere and enriches biodiversity. In other words, it will cause the complete opposite of what the Nature Restoration Law intends in substance (not in the apparent “form”).

In the economic aspect of the project we find an inflationary law that subtracts agri-food production sovereignty from the European Union. Not even the law contains a precise analysis of what can be done with unproductive land, with areas of special land stress that will be defined as unsuitable for cultivation or with the Mediterranean problem. But it does not even deserves an impact analysis (as the Commission always points out) on other policies that the EU is putting in place to guarantee productive sovereignty after the crisis of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

This is the great incoherence of this project.

There is no coherence between these two projects. One seeks to preserve the agri-food supply and the EU’s international food export position and the other aims to eliminate 10% of global production on a European scale. An alternative to the commitment signed at past Climate Summits to restore 30% of degraded lands can and should be sought. Precisely what is considered as “degraded” is not clearly qualified in the articles of the law.

In short, the project deserves to be returned to the Commission. To reformulate it, Timmermans assured that there is no turning back, but reality prevails over the fiction of the garden that the vice-president of the Commission defends. The problem is that the European countryside is not Timmermans’ private garden, nor can the EU sit arms folded in the face of the increased risk of poorly managed fires, droughts and floods in Mediterranean Europe. We have gone too far with the “green agenda”, which now turns out to be very complex to manage. It’s time to stop, think, talk and agree.