Does the EU farm policy enforce a top-down, one-size-fits-all model, or does it allow for country-specific approaches?

A new tailored approach

EU countries have the freedom to support farmers as they see fit, provided they abide by a small number of EU rules and align their efforts with EU objectives and the main farming challenges they have identified.

This happens via each country’s CAP Strategic Plan – a new bottom-up way of working introduced in 2023:

• the EU sets the basic policy rules (the objectives, types of action and basic requirements)
• each EU country develops their own plan, outlining specific priorities, targets and measures, to use EU support to meet their own needs.

One example is that EU countries can determine their biggest environmental challenges for farming and design ‘eco-schemes’ and other environmental measures to tackle them.

This way, national governments have greater responsibility and more control over how to meet the agreed targets.