Two European Commission departments are at war over how much action is needed to make the EU's farming system more environmentally friendly.

Agriculture is one of the most fundamental components of the EU budget and receives about €59 billion of subsidies each year. Politically protected farmers, however, have long avoided tough, binding targets to go green, despite producing about 10 percent of Europe's emissions.

That rural exceptionalism is now under threat. EU civil servants are busy preparing strategy papers for the flagship European Green Deal, which has promised "deeply transformative policies" on agriculture and food when it is presented in full in the spring.

But an internal document from the agriculture department, seen by POLITICO, strongly criticizes the environment department's proposals to slash the use of pesticides and fertilizers, boost organic farming and dedicate more space to nature on farms.

Inside the Commission there is an “epic battle between those who want change and those who don’t,” said one EU official, who accused DG AGRI of using a “destructive wave of actions to block change.”

“How can you reach a compromise when you have completely different world views between the DGs?” — Anonymous EU official

The paper, which gives the name of DG AGRI’s Strategy Director Tassos Haniotis in its metadata, argues that a pending reform of the Commission's Common Agricultural Policy, which subsidizes farmers across the bloc, has all the tools necessary to make EU farming sustainable, without the need for numerical targets, as proposed by DG ENV. Haniotis declined to comment.

It dismisses as "doubt and ex-ante criticism" concerns that the reform may not be ambitious enough to make EU agriculture sustainable.

Though it is unclear whether it is an official policy position, much of the document appears to be a response to a draft of DG ENV's biodiversity strategy, obtained by POLITICO earlier this month. That strategy called for a 2030 target to slash the use of pesticide and fertilizers by 30 percent.

But DG AGRI's document suggests the EU should not set targets for reducing the use or risks of pesticides, and instead focus on "providing alternatives and enhancing the introduction of alternative pest management." It says it would be "meaningless" from a public health perspective to reduce the "volume or value of a long set of very diverse substances."

The EU has committed to measures to "significantly reduce" the risk and use of agricultural chemicals in the Green Deal.

The document also states that for fertilizers “a unified EU-wide quantitative target would fail to address the very different nutrient balance” across member countries. The document floats a different way of measuring excesses in fertilizer use, and says existing EU environmental laws should be more strictly enforced, and CAP measures used to halve the surplus by 2030.

The departments are also at loggerheads over the amount of farmland that should be left free for nature.

DG ENV's strategy aims to curb biodiversity loss by allocating 10 percent of EU agricultural land to non-productive features such as trees and hedges but the DG AGRI document says that would be "excessive."

The paper warns that "isolated (area based) targets" would knock out around 15 percent of the EU's cereal production, potentially raise food prices and even risk destroying biodiversity outside the bloc due to increased reliance on food imports.

A DG ENV proposal to earmark 30 percent of EU agriculture for organic farming is “not just excessive but ignores the realities of a strong, demand-driven expansion in fruits and vegetables,” while other organic sectors grow more slowly, the document says.

Time ticking

With under two months until the College of Commissioners has penciled in the adoption of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies, this document suggests that the Commission is still severely divided on how to make farming greener.

“We have a lot of trouble to talk about content because there [has been] prior resistance [from DG AGRI] regarding how to handle the Green Deal,” said an EU official.

A second EU official said: “How can you reach a compromise when you have completely different world views between the DGs?”

That official was adamant that the DG AGRI document is the wrong approach. “With biodiversity you need to strike at the root causes, you need a systematic change. You need to decrease pesticides, you need to decrease systematic fertilizers, you have to take some land out of the production.”

DG AGRI's Haniotis is a veteran farm policymaker in the Commission, who has previously advocated a gradualist strategy to reducing unsustainable agricultural practices.

In one LinkedIn post about emissions from Europe’s livestock sector, he wrote that “reversing the path towards the abyss will firstly require a slowdown, before the reversal of current trends — there is simply no other way, and the sooner this is publicly acknowledged the better.”

A spokesperson for the European Commission said it is policy not to comment on leaks.

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