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Rapidly growing subsidization of crop insurance in Europe ignores potential environmental effects

Nature Plants volume 9, pages 1938–1939 (2023)Cite this article

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According to the European Green Deal, the EU aims to cut its pesticide use in half by 2030 (ref. 1). To reach this ambitious target, holistic pesticide policies have been proposed to avoid the unwanted side effects of single actions such as pesticide bans2,3. However, not only pesticide policies but also the entire toolkit of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) must be developed holistically to avoid chemical inputs polluting the environment.

However, potential adverse effects of crop insurance subsidies on the environment and resulting conflicts with other public policy goals, such as the reduction of fertilizer and pesticide pollution (for example, ref. 8), are ignored in the current political discussion.

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Fig. 1: EU subsidies for risk management instruments, including premium subsidies, according to EU council regulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business Economics Group, Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Tobias Dalhaus & Niklas Möhring

  2. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Junjie Wu

  3. Production Economics Group, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Niklas Möhring

Authors
  1. Tobias Dalhaus
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  2. Junjie Wu
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  3. Niklas Möhring
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Correspondence to Tobias Dalhaus.

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Dalhaus, T., Wu, J. & Möhring, N. Rapidly growing subsidization of crop insurance in Europe ignores potential environmental effects. Nat. Plants 9, 1938–1939 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-023-01569-9

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