Portugal’s minister for agriculture has a burning desire for the next EU long-term budget: more goats. José Manuel Fernandes wants Brussels to help pay shepherds to let goats, cows and sheep graze on shrubs in areas at high risk of wildfires — a low-tech approach that experts say the EU has been ignoring for too long. Portugal and some regions in Spain are already running their own programs.
As a disastrous summer of droughts and wildfires turns into fall, some countries are grabbing the opportunity to convince counterparts to keep spending billions on farmers in the EU’s next long-term budget. While some nations have called for reducing spending on “traditional” topics like cohesion and agriculture, ministers like Fernandes argue it’s not just about paying farmers, but adapting the food system and the countryside to more extreme weather. The current negotiator at member-country level, Ireland’s Agriculture Minister Martin Heydon, has also hinted he wants the Commission to include agriculture in its upcoming “climate resilience framework” slated for October.
Spain’s Agriculture Minister Luis Planas has also called for more EU money to secure farms against droughts, arguing that crops bred using new gene-editing techniques, which the European Parliament voted to allow in July, could be a part of the solution. As to where the money should come from, Portugal’s Fernandes has an idea: Using funds from the EU’s Emissions Trading System to support the grazing goats.
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