THE FARM TO FORK: IN NEED OF A NEW POLITICAL CONSENSUS

Despite the Covid crises, the war developing in Ukraine and the fears of food shortages in Europe and neighbours’ countries, the Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F) is and remain a flag-ship project of the current European Commission in the context of the Green Deal.

If this political orientation was broadly welcomed and supported until recently, the concrete policy initiatives by the Commission as well as the global context generated debate on this strategy. While the environmental and climate challenge remains, the Farm to Fork is now confronted with an additional challenge: politics. The war in Ukraine has lit the doubts about the feasibility and consequences of the F2F, and fragmented the European Parliament which was until now the driving force on which the Commission was counting to go forward.

The scale of divisions creates uncertainty on the capacity to deliver consensus and a coherent policy path under the current conditions. As the assessment below shows from an initial broad consensus, we moved to a fragmented landscape, where votes are swinging in one direction or the other by only a few (see below).

It goes beyond any doubts the necessity of the transition, needed to assure long-term prosperity, as the International Panel on Climate Change reiterated in its last report. Nevertheless, it’s urgent to propose a policy pathway in a position to build a renewed consensus on a common project, providing guarantees on the feasibility and capacity to deliver of the Farm to Fork without undermining food security and viability of EU farms either in the short term or in a longer term.

This will be possible proposing credible, feasible, and inclusive policy paths. Enhanced sustainable agriculture and innovative agro-ecological principles, re-concealing both environmental and food challenges are showing that solutions exist and should be part of the discussion even more than in the past. Sustainability and food security should both be the lighthouses that guide this transition forward, as underlined already last year by Farm Europe during the Global Food Forum on “The Green Deal: How to make it a good deal?”.

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: farm-europe.eu