Defining ecologically valuable grasslands
The CAP aims to address (regulate, support) the totality of EU agricultural activity and agricultural land. Agricultural land must fall into one of only three categories named by the policy, i.e. permanent crops; arable and permanent pasture (permanent grassland in the definition proposed in the reformed CAP Regulations, see Section 2.2). Although the current definition of permanent grasslands has been widened, it may still be argued that the CAP Regulations themselves currently contain a contradiction in that all land used for agriculture is not necessarily included in a strict interpretation of the permanent pasture definition as individual Member states can still decide to not include grasslands that are not dominated by herbaceous vegetation even though used for grazing.