Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Location: Poland
Academic field: Law
Award category: PhD Team

Guidance Memo

Title: “The impact of European Union Common Agricultural Policy on the intensification of animal farming in Bulgaria, Romania, and the countries that have signed association agreements with the EU”
Keywords: European Union. Bulgaria. Romania. Policy. Government subsidies. Animal welfare.
DOI: 10.15868/socialsector.37974
What We Learned From It:
- Animal farming has intensified in Bulgaria and Romania (both are middle-income countries) in recent years. Many more animals are now reared in large farms that use intensive production practices, while the number of small farms have dwindled.
- The Guidance Memo charts the significant shift toward intensification, and explains why its key driver is the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). CAP payments and subsidies and their unequal distribution to recipients have triggered deep structural changes in the animal agriculture sector in the EU, chief of which is the livestock industry taking advantage of the favorable climate and generous handouts to intensify production.
- At the same time EU animal welfare regulations are not robustly enforced and not comprehensive enough to protect all farm animals. Consumers in the EU, however, are strongly in favor of better treatment of farm animals.

Links

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application

Interrogating an element that plays a key role in driving the intensification of animal agriculture in an entire region of the world is of great interest to Tiny Beam Fund (which encourages the use of a holistic, systems approach and the pursuit of root causes in understanding problems). It is even more intriguing and significant when that element is embedded in the core of a region’s political system.
It has a very clear objective, namely, to provide evidence that “the ongoing intensification of animal farming in Europe results to a very large degree from the EU CAP”.
It aims to provide practical, realistic suggestions “on how to reduce the negative effects that the EU agricultural policies have on farmed animal welfare, by adopting the ‘best practices’ developed within the current CAP framework”.