Portugal's agriculture minister pushes for EU funding to use grazing goats in wildfire prevention

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.

“We are using our national money, but it is work that we are doing for all the European Union,” Fernandes told POLITICO at an informal meeting of ministers in Dublin, arguing that preventing fires helps lower carbon emissions.

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.

“A lot of people don’t know that 42% of the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) is for environmental objectives,” said Fernandes. “The best friends of the environment are the farmers.”

The summer of drought

It’s not just Portugal.

As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen drafts her big State of the Union speech for Wednesday, setting out her priorities for the next year, the agriculture commissioner has said he hopes she’ll announce some action to prepare farms against future droughts.

“We need to do more,” said Agriculture and Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen, including making sure there’s enough water to put out wildfires and to irrigate the fields in dry times.

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.

“If I give money to the transport sector to reduce emissions with ETS, why not also give money to have this fund, where we also have civil protection?” he asked.