Miroslav Toman, the Minister of Agriculture of the Czech Republic from 2018 to 2021, is a Czech agronomist, businessman, and diplomat. He has played an instrumental role in the negotiations around the European Green Deal, the plan to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050.

In this wide-ranging Q&A, he discusses the impact of the European Green Deal, the ambitious Europe-wide program to make Europe carbon neutral by 2050. A key challenge is making the set of instruments uniform yet broad enough that individual countries can choose the measures that will allow them to achieve the Green Deal’s objectives at lower costs while taking local conditions into account.

In the agriculture and food industries, the primary goal is not to reduce greenhouse emissions but to protect biodiversity and other environmental components (water, soil) by supporting organic farming and reducing the consumption of crop protection products and mineral nitrogen fertilizers.

The Czech Republic, with more than 15% of organically farmed land, is one of the countries with the the most widespread organic farming in the EU. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture make up only about 6% of the Czech Republic’s total national emissions, and this share is one of the lowest in the EU.

Read the complete excerpt from the Clairfield Outlook 2022 here: European Green Deal Clairfield Outlook 2022