Feedback responds to the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy

In response to today’s publication of the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Feedback, said:

“Today’s EU Farm to Fork strategy is an essential and long overdue recognition of the critical role food policy must play in achieving European climate and biodiversity goals: what we eat, how it is grown, processed, transported and sold, are glaring missing pieces of the EU’s climate policy. We hope that, in the shadow of the delay to CoP26, the EU will go one step further and commit to binding targets for food system transformation as part of its contribution to the meeting of the Paris Agreement. Concrete, widespread action to address the scandal of food waste, to shift rapidly to plant-based diets and curb wasteful and damaging production practices are all crucial to the EU’s climate leadership – and to averting catastrophic climate change. 

“Despite its ambition, this strategy chooses to skirt around the thorniest questions at the heart of the EU’s food system: it recognises the urgent need for a shift towards more sustainable diets on the one hand, but fails to acknowledge the billions of public Euros spent every year on propping up the ecologically catastrophic livestock industry – the EU spends 18-20% of its entire budget on livestock. We simply cannot achieve widespread, urgent, and deep cuts in industrial meat and dairy consumption required for climate stabilisation, while public funds are disbursed to an obsolete industry. On food waste, the EU has long dithered over the binding targets which will be necessary to achieve the rapid change needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goal to halve food waste across Europe by 2030, an issue on which this strategy remains inexplicably silent. This strategy opens many doors to action –but the time for good intention is long over, we must now see ambitious action from European leaders, commensurate with the climate and ecological emergencies.”