Which topics dominate debates on agriculture in the Bundestag?

The European Union (EU) reformed the Common Agricultural Policy in 2023. As part of the reform, the European Commission defined ten science-based core challenges for agriculture. Empirical studies by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have looked at how these challenges are represented in the political debate on agriculture in Germany. 707 speeches from debates in the German Bundestag between 2017 and 2022, the years before the EU reform, were examined. A machine learning method, structural topic modelling, was used for this purpose. This method uses probability distributions to recognize patterns in large volumes of text that indicate the topics covered.

Nine out of ten key topics can be found in debates

The research revealed 24 topics that dominated the debates. These addressed nine of the ten challenges identified by the European Commission. The dominant topic was rural development. In second place was the tension between economic pressure and social expectations, to which family farms are particularly exposed.

The only challenge by the European Commission that has not been addressed is the generational change in agriculture. “This can probably be attributed to the fact that farmers in Germany are, on average, significantly younger than their colleagues in the EU. Generational change generally seems to be working in this country,” explains Philipp Mennig, researcher at the Chair of Production and Resource Economics of Agricultural Enterprises, who carried out the analyses.

Economic issues were put forward

There was also a clear temporal trend regarding the negotiations on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy: the closer the reform came, the more frequently economic issues were debated. On the other hand, rural development and issues of more national importance, such as groundwater pollution with nitrates, were discussed less frequently.

Philipp Mennig summarizes: “The results are fundamentally positive: the debates in the German Bundestag certainly address core challenges that the international research community also identifies. The extent to which the debates contribute to the development of science-based agricultural policy measures is, of course, another matter.”