Extensive EU funding has been handed out to winegrowers across the bloc for restructuring projects without any consideration for their environmental impact or whether the changes make the vineyards more competitive, a report by the bloc’s Luxembourg-based budget watchdog has found.
Around €500 million in EU funds has been dished out annually for the last decade to assist winegrowers, but there is scant proof that the handouts have actually helped either the climate or the sector as a whole, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) concluded.
Under the bloc’s common agricultural policy, wine producers can receive financial support to restructure their vineyards, in order to make them more competitive as well as to install systems to reduce their carbon footprint.
As demand has slumped, Luxembourg has sharply cut its wine production over the last two decades, avoiding scenes in France where winegrowers have been forced to resort to destroying or converting surplus bottles into ethanol.
The five countries visited by auditors – Spain, France, Italy, Greece and the Czech Republic – accounted for 70% of the EU restructuring payments.
Funding had simply been approved for all eligible requests without the use of “criteria to select projects to foster competitiveness,” auditors said.
“These member states also funded projects for which a structural change could not be observed,” the ECA report noted. “Neither the Commission nor the member states we visited assess how the projects contribute to the competitiveness objective, and beneficiaries are not required to report on how their restructuring activity made them more competitive,” the auditors added.
The five countries did not assess the environmental impact of the support programmes, the report found, and in some cases the replacement systems installed under the scheme could actually harm the climate.
“In practice, projects did not aim to reduce the climate-related and/or environmental impact of wine growing. Under certain circumstances, we saw that they could even have the opposite effect, such as switching to varieties that need more water, requiring irrigation systems to be installed,” the auditors said.
The auditors also issued a warning about the latest round of funding for the new common agricultural policy, which came into effect earlier this year. A requirement for environmental conditions to be met in return for funding for restructuring plans has been removed, while broader climate goals attached to general payments for the wine sector remain weak, the ECA said.
“Also, EU countries will have to use only a minimum 5% of the money earmarked for the wine sector on actions linked to climate change, the environment and sustainability. The auditors find this figure of 5% rather low, given that, under a greener CAP, 40% of all agriculture expenditure is expected to target climate-related objectives,” the auditors said.
