The new European Livestock Strategy places extensive grazing among the essential tools for protecting the territory, although the sector is demanding economic measures to guarantee its future.
The European Commission has taken an important step in recognizing the role of extensive livestock farming in Europe. The new EU Livestock Strategy, presented on July 7, identifies sheep and goat farming as essential activities for conserving ecosystems, preventing forest fires, and maintaining rural life.
The document represents institutional support for a production model that, for decades, has contributed to the care of the land far beyond food production. The Commission expressly recognizes that extensive grazing provides essential environmental services and is indispensable for the conservation of numerous European natural areas.
A necessary recognition for the sector
The new Strategy also puts figures to the difficult situation facing the sector. In the last twenty years, the European sheep and goat population has decreased by 26%, currently standing at around 54 million sheep and 10 million goats .
Grazing: the best ally against fires
One of the most relevant aspects of the document is the recognition of the role that extensive livestock farming plays in landscape management.
According to the European Commission itself, approximately 35 million hectares of protected habitats depend on grazing to remain in good condition. The disappearance of this activity favors the accumulation of scrubland, increases the risk of large forest fires, and accelerates the loss of biodiversity.
For INTEROVIC, this recognition confirms something the sector has been advocating for years: herds not only produce quality food, but also generate environmental and social benefits that impact the whole of society.
“The European Commission’s long-awaited recognition of the strategic role of sheep and goats is excellent news. Now the challenge is to translate that recognition into measures that will keep farms alive and ensure generational renewal in the sector,” says Raúl Muñiz, president of INTEROVIC.
An accurate diagnosis with few immediate solutions
Although the Strategy provides a very precise analysis of the sector’s situation, INTEROVIC believes that the proposed measures are still insufficient to reverse the process of abandonment experienced by extensive livestock farming.
The document proposes more than thirty actions focused on studies, roadmaps and support tools, but does not incorporate concrete mechanisms that guarantee adequate remuneration for the environmental services provided by livestock farmers.
An opportunity to build a stronger livestock industry
INTEROVIC welcomes the fact that, for the first time, the Commission has positioned extensive livestock farming as part of the solution to some of the major European challenges such as adaptation to climate change, fire prevention, biodiversity conservation and territorial cohesion.
The sector now hopes that this institutional recognition will translate into policies capable of guaranteeing the continuity of thousands of family farms that keep the European rural environment alive, and especially the Spanish one, where more than two hundred and fifty thousand families, most of them located in depopulated Spain, depend on the sheep and goat sector.
As Muñiz concludes, “we shouldn’t only remember the sheep and goat sector at certain times of the year, like summer, when the risk of fires increases. We should do so all year round. As we have been reminding everyone for years, every time a consumer chooses suckling lamb, lamb, or goat meat, they are helping our farmers continue to live in rural areas and maintain extensive livestock farming that contributes much more to the land than it needs from it . ”
