Ursula von der Leyen is hardly the flavour of the month with farmers, who fear the European Commission president’s plan to subsume the CAP budget into a single budget. Now, she is being blamed for a move that has deeply divided the parliament into left and right, and it could have consequences for getting any kind of budget over the line on schedule.

On the face of it, the move to quash greenwashing rules might seem to some farmers to be a good thing. For those farmers who see the environmental movement as anti-farming and overly prescriptive, that is understandable. However, the effect of greenwashing, or carbon offsetting as it is more properly called, is quite complex. Particularly in relation to land use pressures, already stretched to breaking point.

The way it works is that companies with a large carbon footprint are allowed to offset their emissions by doing something that acts as a carbon sink or a renewable energy producer. That might be a solar farm, it might be a forestry plantation. Such a dynamic sees airlines and chemical producers looking for land to carry out such actions, inflating land prices and outbidding farmers. This is a main contention of the “Save Leitrim” campaign, that railed against foreign companies buying up land to plant forestry to improve their carbon inventory.

The potential upside of carbon offsets for farmers is that it might create high demand for carbon credits. And carbon credits are something many farmers aspire to. As long as the existence of a carbon sink on grassland, cropland, land set aside by farmers as space for nature or farmer-owned forestry can be verified, then the thinking might be the more carbon offsetting is allowed, the better.

However, there is a danger that farmers in the future will need to use their own carbon credits to offset their use of chemical fertiliser, pesticides or other pollutants and hydrocarbon products. So high market value of carbon credits could become a double-edged sword.

In the meantime, there is the more pressing problem of the political fallout from von der Leyen’s latest stunt. The Socialists, who have traditionally signed off on big EU legislation with von der Leyen’s EPP in centre-right/centre-left compromise deals, are enraged by von der Leyen siding with the parties on the right of centre to get greenwashing off the agenda.

The three groupings on the right are the European Conservatives and Reformists, with 78 seats, the Patriots for Europe with 84 seats and the Europe of Sovereign Nations group who have 25 MEPs. The EPP can gain a majority in the 720-member parliament when they add their 188 votes to these three groupings. They don’t even need the centrist Renew group.

Will this see the EU lurch to the right as the USA, Italy and the Netherlands have? It’s too early to tell. But it’s clear that the old political alliances in the European Parliament are breaking down, just as both the policy and the budget for farming for the next decade are up for decision.