On 29 June, the European Parliament’s Agriculture Committee held its first discussion of the draft report on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for 2028–2034, presented by rapporteur Norbert Lins MEP. The CAP is the EU’s farm policy, and this regulation sets the rules for how farm support will be paid out. That makes it one of the most important files for wildlife on Europe’s farmland, because those rules decide what farmers are rewarded for doing.

Norbert Lins MEP built his report around seven priorities, including a guaranteed minimum budget for the environment and animal welfare. At the same time, his report largely leaves it to national governments to decide how much money agriculture actually receives under the next EU budget.

The liveliest political argument was about limits on payments to individual farms. The rapporteur proposes that no single farm should receive more than €500.000 in direct payments and would scrap the rule that payments are gradually reduced above a certain level. Several political groups preferred the European Commission’s much lower ceiling of €100.000.

For nature, though, the bigger question was how much freedom national governments should have. The S&D Group warned that the report turns many rules that are currently compulsory into optional ones, arguing this is far from a technical detail and risks pulling apart the common rules that make the CAP a genuinely shared policy.

Renew took a different angle: it backed environmental ambition that works in practice on the farm, supported reserving 35% of rural development money for environmental schemes on farmland, and argued that real change comes from rewarding farmers, not burying them in paperwork.

The Parliament’s Environment Committee pushed in the same direction. Its draft opinion, led by rapporteur Sean Kelly MEP, called a dedicated, protected environmental budget essential if farmers are to deliver for nature, and framed the whole approach around the idea that the health of ecosystems, animals and people are all connected (known as One Health).

One point stood out for conservation. An MEP pointed out that under the proposal, payments to farmers in Natura 2000 areas (Europe’s network of protected nature sites) remain optional, even though the obligations that come with those sites are legally binding on farmers.

Why does this matter to hunters? The debate confirmed the central question for the years ahead: whether the future CAP will give farmers and land managers both the motivation and the money to maintain and restore the farmland habitats on which so much of Europe’s wildlife depends.