Today marks the launch of Ursula Von Der Leyen’s Strategic Dialogues on the future of agriculture. ECVC is participating and strongly hopes that this will be an opportunity to change the paradigm and work towards food sovereignty. The dialogue must lead to concrete solutions enabling a real transition for food systems.
We are witnessing farm numbers plummet massively across the EU-27. Between 2005 and 2020, this number declined by about 37% , especially among the smallest farms. However, the need to feed citizens with healthy seasonal food that is financially accessible to all, including the poorest sectors of the population, can only be done if we have many more farms across the EU territory.
Therefore, for ECVC, the Strategic Dialogue must address three crucial levers of action to support existing farmers and help young and new entrants to begin farming:
- Economic: ensure farmers receive a decent income and can therefore plan a future in the profession. To do this, farmers must be paid fair prices and agriculture must be removed from Free Trade Agreements, which destroy agriculture globally.
- Land planning: youth need to access land. Legislation must be put in place at the EU level to regulate land, as called for in the INI report on generational renewal and outlined in ECVC’s draft land directive proposal.
- Rights on seeds: Institutions must block the deregulation of GMOs, as provided for in the proposal on new genomic techniques (NGTs). The spread of patented and untraced GMOs in the EU would seriously threaten farmers' rights to seeds, jeopardize the entire GMO-free agricultural sector (and in particular small agroecological farms), sacrifice food sovereignty, and bring huge profits to multinationals holding patents on these NTGs.
Geneviève Savigny, farmer and ECVC representative in the Strategic Dialogue stated: “The thousands of farmers taking the street show that the so-called competitive industrial model gives no future to a vast majority of producers, but also to consumers and citizens. ECVC calls on the institutions to change paradigm to move towards food sovereignty.”
As president of the European Commission, Von der Leyen has the capacity to ensure policy coherence, restrain the neo-liberal doxa and prove she is listening to the discontent of farmers across Europe who are being pushed to breaking point. Action is urgently needed.
Contact information
Geneviève Savigny
FR, EN
ECVC representative in the Strategic Dialogue
+33 6 25 55 16 87
Vitor Rodrigues
PT, EN, ES
ECVC Coordinating Committee
+ 351966468055
ECVC Office
press@eurovia.org
+32 2 217 31 12