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Just days into President Ursula von der Leyen’s second EU Commission, main European meals giants together with Danone and Unilever wasted no time in delivering a pointed problem to new Agriculture and Food Commissioner, Christophe Hansen. In a 9 December letter, the group urges Hansen to develop an formidable Vision for Agriculture and Food to speed up Europe’s sustainable meals transition, framing this enterprise as equally important for the business’s long-term competitiveness.
Central to their attraction is Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform – presently amongst Brussels’s hot-button points – with the sector advocating for a brand new system of environmental funds that improve yearly, serving to farmers steadiness inexperienced and financial requirements. The Danone-led group can also be pushing for boosted funding for younger and new farmers to make sure EU agri-food resilience amid the getting older sector’s main demographic challenges. Facing a good budgetary scenario, Hansen and von der Leyen might want to convene a variety of stakeholders to implement this new imaginative and prescient and exchange the previous mandate’s ‘stick’-heavy regulatory method with a ‘carrot’ system primarily based on inexperienced farming incentives and progressive revenue assist measures.
CAP overhaul anchoring future talks
In his first days in workplace, Commissioner Hansen has set a daring tone for reform, expressing his assist for disbursing a bigger share of the bloc’s €387 billion CAP subsidy programme to small, low-income farmers. Long its largest supply of criticism, the CAP continues to disproportionately reward agribusiness giants, with the biggest 20% of farms absorbing 80% of the funds as a result of system’s outdated hectare-based fee system.
Acknowledging the budgetary constraints amid mounting protection and reindustrialisation priorities in Brussels, Hansen has characterised his name for a CAP overhaul that “higher targets the assist to these most in want” as an “evolution” to re-balance the farming assist system in a financially possible method. Nevertheless, Hansen’s proposed adjustments may mark the CAP’s most profound reorientation in its six-decade existence.
This new method follows the Commission’s current compromises to dilute the environmental targets of final mandate’s Farm to Fork technique, largely in response to the bloc’s sweeping farmers’ protests by farmers and MEP strain forward of the European elections. Yet, whereas the latter basically quantities to shallow, albeit pro-farmer, political pandering, Hansen’s urge for food for real innovation bodes properly for the sector’s future.
Echoing Hansen’s strategic focus, the EU Council permitted a set of conclusions on 9 December outlining key priorities for CAP revision, with the bloc’s 27 agriculture ministers stressing the necessity for farmers’ equitable remuneration, fairer and extra clear provide chains worth distribution and bolstered competitiveness throughout the EU’s agri-food sector.
Dismantling lingering obstacles
This rising momentum for change displays Brussels’s broader recognition that financial viability should underpin sustainable agricultural practices. On 10 December, Von der Leyen supplied her personal proposals to bolster the sector’s negotiating place, from necessary contracts between farmers and meals corporations to softened competitors guidelines for younger farmers and tighter oversight of retail pricing, whereas Hansen has equally highlighted the exploitative, income-killing practices of main retailers.
Yet, regardless of these good intentions, the EU govt dangers undermining the farmers they goal to assist with a lingering vestige of the widely-discredited Farm to Fork agenda: the front-of-package vitamin label proposal. Indeed, the French creates Nutri-Score has as soon as once more discovered itself in a media storm, with French retail big Carrefour just lately mandating that suppliers show the label on all on-line merchandise, threatening to publicly name out producers that fail to conform.
The EU can not in good religion again a labelling system which the very supermarkets they goal to rein in at the moment are utilizing to strain EU producers – notably on condition that Nutri-Score has lengthy disproportionately impacted the bloc’s small, native farmers. With its outdated algorithm, Nutri-Score continues to unfairly grade pure, conventional merchandise, akin to olive oil, PDO cheeses and cured meats, on the coronary heart of Europe’s culinary heritage and balanced dietary traditions.
Local farmers throughout Europe have risen towards this misguided imposition that undermines their competitiveness and grocery store bargaining energy, prompting an increasing group of governments, together with these of Portugal, Spain, Greece and Czechia, to snub the label. The agri-food business’s greatest gamers, akin to Danone, as soon as a key backer of Nutri-Score, are equally beginning to drop the label, recognising its deceptive influence for customers.
Even in France, impartial dietary analysis is more and more proving Nutri-Score’s opponents proper, opposite to the Nutri-Score crew’s claims of unanimous scientific backing. The Commission ought to due to this fact persistently apply its rising coverage method and relegate the labelling proposal to the previous.
Scaling progressive new options
The EU govt should as a substitute deal with novel concepts to bolster farmers’ competitiveness whereas facilitating the sustainable transition. Commissioner Hansen has inspired the bloc’s farmers to discover “various revenue” streams to reinforce the sector’s financial resilience, citing rising crops for biofuels, planting bushes for carbon credit score funds and optimising land utilization with photo voltaic panels and different types of inexperienced power manufacturing.
The latter avenue, dubbed “agrivoltaics,” has emerged as a very promising answer over the previous yr, with the EU already recognising its potential by together with funding and assist mechanisms in innovation programmes akin to Horizon Europe. Paired with tax incentives and credit for inexperienced power and agricultural practices, the EU might help pave the way in which for farmers to unlock their full contribution to a “resilient, aggressive and sustainable agri-food system European meals system” – a mission von der Leyen has assigned the newly-launched European Board on Agriculture and Food tasked with de-polarising the coverage debate and renewing ties with farmers.
The path ahead calls for daring management. The EU Commission might want to embrace the current name from business leaders like Danone and Unilever to steadiness environmental ambition with financial pragmatism, with CAP reform providing the muse to launch this new agenda. Delivering focused incentives and higher assist for younger and small farmers is not only a coverage precedence, however a necessity for the sector’s future. Now is the time to maneuver past restrictive approaches and domesticate real cooperation on the coronary heart of Europe’s agri-food system.
