The European Commission’s new Vision on Food and Agriculture focuses overwhelmingly on what is happening on farms, ignoring almost every other part of the food sector.
The vision, which is intended to steer the direction of agriculture and diets in the EU for the next five years, largely overlooks crucial players including the large food companies who shape every aspect of the agri-food sector, and consumers who are struggling to access healthy food.
“European diets are fundamentally shaped by an industrial food system that makes it hard for people to choose healthy, sustainable food,” said Julia Christian, Fern’s Forests and Agriculture Policy Adviser.
“Instead of supporting measures to encourage consumers to eat more vegetables, pulses and fruits—such as a dedicated EU Plant-Based Action Plan, which is already being successfully implemented in Denmark, with the support of farmers’ organisations—the Commission has focused almost exclusively on agricultural production, missing the bigger picture of food system reform.”
“Rather than presenting a vision that all can rally behind, the Commission’s Vision deepens polarisation. They have ignored the delicate balance that months of dialogue between a broad range of parties achieved, and reframed agri-food systems as a narrow question of production practices. In doing so, the Commission ironically reinforces the idea that the burden for sustainable food is on the shoulders of farmers, and has failed to seize the chance to change EU agri-food systems so that they can meet the deep challenges they face.”
“I feel sorry for the people who gave months of their time to the Strategic Dialogue, only for their work to be ignored.”
Background
The Vision on Food and Agriculture is supposed to draw from recommendations made by the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of Agriculture, a forum convened by the European Commission over the course of 2024. This forum, which included farmer associations, agri-food businesses, NGOs, financial institutions, and academic experts, unanimously agreed on a set of recommendations which covered the gamut of issues in the food sector, from production to consumption.
Unfortunately, this delicate balance has been lost in the Vision. Particularly surprising is the near-total failure to take up any of the Strategic Dialogue’s recommendations on issues affecting consumers, whether on unhealthy diets or unaffordable food.
A particularly glaring omission is the Strategic Dialogue’s recommendation to support the increased uptake of plant-based proteins. Within EU farming, meat production accounts for a disproportionate share of resource use in the agricultural sector. Supporting Europeans to replace some of the meat they eat with pulses, vegetables and fruits would be extremely impactful in decreasing carbon emissions, water scarcity, land scarcity and the reliance on protein imports—all of which were flagged as key problems by the Vision. This can be done, as the experience of Denmark’s Plant-based Action Plan shows, in a way that creates new opportunities for farmers and has their support.
Supporting Europeans to eat less meat and more vegetables and pulses would also benefit their health. Currently, EU governments pay €280 billion per year to deal just with cardiovascular diseases’ (CVD) consequences. As a comparison, this is more than five times the amount the EU spends on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) every year. A huge amount of this is preventable: half of the years lost to death and disability from CVD are caused by unhealthy diets, i.e. excessive consumption of salt and red and processed meats, and insufficient consumption of vegetables, fruits, pulses, and whole grains. Astoundingly, the Vision not only does not address this problem—it does not even mention it.
By excessively focusing on the production side of food systems and ignoring consumption, the Commission – ironically, given their repeated statements on their commitment to reduce farmers’ burden—focuses disproportionately on farmers and what they need to do to achieve sustainability, thereby fuelling the problem they claim to be concerned about. As a result, the majority of the measures mentioned in the Vision involve farmers changing their practices; there is, for instance, very little required from large companies in the middle of food supply chains. This is a huge missed opportunity.
The Vision’s main tool for achieving sustainability is to get payments to farmers via carbon or nature credits (offsets, in practice). There’s one big problem with this: as decades of global experience with carbon markets shows, it would be hard to dream up something more bureaucratic and burdensome for small landowners than certifying carbon or biodiversity for the purposes of offsetting.
Rather than viewing sustainability in the agri-food sector as solely farmers’ responsibility, the EU needs to place accountability where it belongs: on the giant food manufacturers, retailers and fast food chains who actively encourage consumers to eat unhealthy food because the ingredients are cheaper and the margins are bigger.
There are ways to do this—for example, our proposal to require large companies to ensure the ready meals they sell are healthy and sustainable—but this so-called “Vision” does not include anything in that direction. The only place where it starts to put the burden in the right place is in its call to stop companies from purchasing farmers’ produce below their costs of production.
The Vision claims it wants to build trust and decrease polarisation. The Strategic Dialogue offered a glimmer of hope for doing so, since it brought together people from different interest groups to unanimously agree on key recommendations. By failing to honour the full breadth of these recommendations, and mainly cherry-picking the agribusiness lobby groups’ asks, the Vision takes several giant steps in the wrong direction. It both re-instates polarisation, and – because it does not learn from non-industry actors’ valuable critiques – fails to offer real solutions to the challenges we face, some of which are existential.
Image: Christian Mueller/Shutterstock
Categories: Press Releases, Meat consumption