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Over 80% of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy supports emissions-intensive animal products

Nature Food volume 5, pages 288–292 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 17 April 2024

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Abstract

The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy strongly influences the European Union’s food system via agricultural subsidies. Linking global physical input–output datasets with public subsidy data reveals that current allocation favours animal-based foods, which uses 82% of the European Union’s agricultural subsidies (38% directly and 44% for animal feed). Subsidy intensity (€ kg−1) for animal-based foods approximately doubles after feed inclusion. The same animal-based foods are associated with 84% of embodied greenhouse gas emissions of EU food production while supplying 35% of EU calories and 65% of proteins.

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Fig. 1: Overview of CAP subsides in the European Union in relation to food types, international exports, emissions and subsidy intensities.
Fig. 2: Arable land, embodied land use and subsidies for the top 15 land-consuming EU countries.

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Data availability

All data used in this study are available in open-access databases. The FABIO database is available via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2577066) and the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) Public Database is available via the agridata platform of the European Commission (https://agridata.ec.europa.eu/extensions/FADNPublicDatabase/FADNPublicDatabase.html). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Example code of the performed analyses is available on FABIO’s GitHub (https://github.com/fineprint-global/fabio).

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Acknowledgements

A.J.K. was funded by the KR Foundation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Anniek J. Kortleve, José M. Mogollón & Paul Behrens

  2. Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, UK

    Helen Harwatt

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  1. Anniek J. Kortleve
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  2. José M. Mogollón
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  3. Helen Harwatt
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  4. Paul Behrens
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Contributions

All authors provided inputs in the final manuscript. A.J.K., J.M.M. and P.B. designed the study. A.J.K. collected the data and performed the analysis with help of J.M.M., P.B. and H.H. and A.J.K. led the writing with major contributions by P.B., J.M.M. and H.H.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anniek J. Kortleve.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Food thanks Valeria Pineiro, Rob Vos and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–6.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Tables 1–3

Concordance table, contribution analysis, table of Fig. 1c,d.

Source data

Source Data Figs. 1 and 2

Each individual data point plotted in Figs. 1 and 2.

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Kortleve, A.J., Mogollón, J.M., Harwatt, H. et al. Over 80% of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy supports emissions-intensive animal products. Nat Food 5, 288–292 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00949-4

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