Agriculture - why is this important?
Food imports combined with intensive farming that produces commodities and feeds the worldwide demand for monocultures and livestock food is the core problem undermining EU agriculture sovereignty. This approach has proven to be destructive, inefficient, wasteful, cruel, unhealthy and leading to exceeding the critical limits of the earth's resilience.
On May 20th, the EU Commission presented its Farm to Fork strategy, however without coherence between the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the way our food is traded, competition policies, as well as the EU budget, the results of the Farm to Forkstrategy will remain very limited. As a consequence, this will keep big companies and large landowners to still win out over smaller farms.
The change we want to see
The ability to supply EU citizens with food without being dependent from the global production and transport schemes is key in order to achieve food sovereignty and food security for all Europeans and make it as locally and resilient as possible.
For that, the EU needs to rethink the way we produce our food. In particular, we call on the European Commission, national leaders in EU Member States and the European Parliament
to:
- Ensure that the European recovery plan and the EU agriculture policies, including the Common Agricultural policy (CAP), the Farm to Fork and the Biodiversity strategy, support small scale farmers, promote sustainable farming and short food supply chains, protect animal welfare, restore biodiversity, and promote the transition into healthy and environmentally friendly agriculture to all Europeans, in line with the European Green Deal master plan.
- Provide a decent and stable economic support for farmers to effectively engage in a just transition towards agroecology.
- Ensure that the EU agricultural system fosters short circuits of food chains on regional or local food chains, bringing the food production and conservation process closer to citizens.
