Farmers’ Attitudes toward the Future of Direct Payments: An Empirical Study from Germany

The new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform has met with large-scale protests from farmers throughout Europe, intending to change one of the most controversial components: direct payments. We analyze German farmers' attitudes and understanding of direct payments. The study employs a sur-vey of 435 farmers collected from January to Febru-ary 2021. Using cluster analysis and quantitative content analysis, we identified three distinct groups: (1) The “Independents” (43.7%) are entrepreneurs and have a competitive mindset. They would prefer to abolish direct payments associated with more freedom from policy conditions. (2) The “Conservatives” (27.0%) advocate an income policy based on direct payments, and they reject higher environmental standards. (3) The “Environmentalists” (30.3%) em-phasize a pronounced environmental awareness, fa-voring an environmentally performance-based ap-proach. The results show that policies are often per-ceived differently than they are intentionally designed. Improving the effectiveness of the policy measure requires sufficient information about the CAP's objec-tives for farmers, focusing on more transparent com-munication strategies. From a policy perspective, a more differentiated design of policy instruments and longer transformation periods are needed to engage farmers in policy change.

新的共同农业政策（Common Agricultural Policy, CAP）改革在整个欧洲引发了农民的大规模抗议，该改革旨在调整其中最具争议的内容之一——直接支付。本文分析了德国农民对直接支付的态度与认知。研究采用了2021年1月至2月期间收集的435份农民调查问卷，通过聚类分析与定量内容分析识别出三类不同群体：（1）‘独立派’（占比43.7%）为企业家型农民，具备竞争思维，更倾向于取消直接支付以获得摆脱政策条件约束的更大自由；（2）‘保守派’（占比27.0%）主张以直接支付为基础的收入政策，且反对更高的环境标准；（3）‘环保派’（占比30.3%）具有强烈的环境意识，倾向于基于环境绩效的政策路径。研究结果表明，政策的实际认知往往与其设计初衷存在偏差。提升该政策措施的有效性需向农民充分传递CAP的目标信息，并聚焦于更透明的沟通策略；从政策层面而言，需对政策工具进行更差异化的设计，并设置更长的转型期，以推动农民参与政策变革。