Outlook Conference: High time to go beyond the status quo!

For the first time since Covid-19, agricultural stakeholders gathered in person to evaluate and discuss the future of European agriculture in terms of the economic, social, climate and environmental and diplomatic crises we are currently facing.

As ECVC stated during the conference, maintaining our current food supply chains and agricultural policies is incompatible with achieving the goals of the F2F strategy and Green Deal, and does not respond to the demands of farmers or citizens.

It is high time to carry out a fair transition and create a real link between agricultural policies and measures and protecting climate, environment, rural and youth development, respect of human and workers’ rights, and access to healthy fresh food for everyone regardless of how much they earn.

Elisabeth Paul, farmer in Italy and representative of ECVC, explained during the conference that the solutions brought forward to tackle the current food crisis are unfortunately not enough. “We should take this period as an opportunity to start the fair and necessary transition. The conference presents liberalisation of the market as a solution but in the pig sector, the direct effect of this is actually more industrialisation. This reinforces sanitary crises such as African Swine fever, worsens the disastrous impact of water stress and means markets are actually causing significant damage, notably via food speculation.”

Similarly, Andoni Garcia Arriola, farmer in the Basque Country and member of the ECVC Coordinating Committee, underlined the importance of guaranteeing the transition through coherent public policy: “The CAP National Strategic Plans do not have sufficient tools to provide the urgent changes needed. Small farms are still disappearing and the state of the environment is declining. More than ever, the EU must consider food sovereignty in Europe and, with this, market regulation. One positive example is the implementation of the Unfair Trading Practices Directive in Spain, which has been used to ensure that by farmers’ production costs are covered by the prices the receive.”

In reality, ECVC has long since been demanding that the institutions take action towards this fair transition and more sustainable practices based on peasant agroecology. How and why we must ensure this has been laid out in its Manifesto for agricultural transition to address systemic climate crises, published last week. The Outlook Conference demonstrated once more the need to go beyond current proposals to achieve the necessary transition, and ECVC small- and medium-scale farmers showed their commitment to continue to defend the interests of farmers and European citizens.