The Farm to Fork strategy is likely to turn out to be a big flop. And the most expensive and problematic “green” initiatives of the European Commission.

The Farm to Fork strategy is risking becoming a big flop. The Commission’s Directorate General for Agriculture, DG AGRI, wrote “Overview of the politically sensitive topics” last December. It aimed to give the Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski, traditionally a defender of conservative farmers’ interests in the EU, an updated valuation of the 31 green policies that impact food and farming. According to the DG AGRI, which is still the manager of agricultural markets and the disburser of subsidies of billions of euros under the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, the current situation is not so good, criticizing several green proposed procedures.

For example, the DG AGRI document states that the European Commission’s new Nature Restoration Regulation to improve nature repair and the circular economy are politically complex for the farming sector, defining it as a “costly” plan that will strongly impact the CAP budget. The legislation proposes to restore 20% of the EU’s degraded ecosystems by 2030 and all ecosystems needing restoration by 2050, accusing intensive agriculture as one of the main culprits of biodiversity loss. According to DG AGRI, the initiative to improve soil health and the revision of the Industrial Emission Directive will heavily affect the CAP budget and cattle farms, creating obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, it is unclear how the upcoming carbon removals certification regulation will align with the EU’s list of green investments.

Also, the proposal to address greenwashing by companies has been smashed in the DG AGRI note, judged as too burdensome, since using the Product Environmental Footprint method to verify green claims is unsuitable for the food and agriculture sector. That’s because, according to DG AGRI, the methodology cannot capture positive externalities generated by agriculture on the environment and the farming community have expressed many worries about that. For all these reasons, most of the ambitious EU’s green food reforms risk being delayed or blocked by political fights among farmers, EU officials and diplomats.

The DG AGRI document argues that there are concerns about reforms such as greening food supply in public canteens or raising animal welfare standards, which could further push up food prices when inflation is already dramatically heavy. The proposal to create nutrient profiles for the amount of sugar or fat as legal thresholds that a food can contain to claim itself as healthy has been delayed and described by DG AGRI as “potentially highly sensitive”. At the same time, the use of genetically modified crops in agriculture is considered “highly sensitive”.

In short, in the Farm to Fork strategy, there are a lot of sensitivities, making it incapable of meeting the objectives of the Green New Deal. If many things do not change, as Politico writes, it will be a “Farm to Flop”. As European Livestock Voice (with our Italian partners of Carni Sostenibili), we underlined the nine main paradoxes of the F2F strategy already a year ago. Maybe, rather than dumping everything after so much effort, it is time to face reality and reform such a strategy for the sake of the Green Deal and EU sustainability. Which, we must remind, is not only environmental but also social and economic.