In recent years, the global political situation and European public policies have been shaken by war, climate disasters and social, health, and economic crises, characterised by an increasingly simplistic, populist, and polarised political discourse, leading to the rise of the extreme right in many countries. In addition, instead of focusing on implementing much-needed, genuine paradigm changes institutions have often focused on techno-fixes and false solutions such as carbon farming and new genetic modified organisms which, if implemented, will only further exacerbate current issues.
The good news is that agroecology is already in our fields, and communities are engaging everywhere in Europe to build sustainable food systems. However, it is unrealistic to think this change can be achieved solely through EU citizens and local communities changing their behaviour. We see that today, in the midst of the economic crisis that is impacting large sectors of EU society, the quest for ever cheaper goods is even more pronounced, compromising the transition to a better system.
To scale up agroecology, there is a need to act holistically at the policy level in order to remove the obstacles that prevent agroecology spreading and to ensure the human right to food for all. This transition toward agroecology, showed to be realistic and feasible by a number of studies , needs to be inclusive. One key outcome should be to double the number of farmers in Europe by 2040, by supporting existing farmers in the agroecological transition and setting up 10 million new small- and medium-scale farms.
Scaling up agroecology also requires substantial investment and systemic changes in agricultural policies. Shifting subsidies towards agroecological practices and away from harmful industrial agriculture is vital. All public policies should promote and foster agroecology and fair incomes for food producers, in order to facilitate sustainable management of production-based resources, particularly in the context of climate change. Additionally, there should be efforts to improve awareness among different actors in the food system, including farmers, policymakers, researchers, and civil society actors.
The Farm to Fork Strategy adopted by the EC in 2020 was an attempt to ensure that EU food systems can transition toward a more sustainable model, but the instruments proposed to reach the objectives of the strategy were in certain cases insufficient, and in other cases contradictory or even counterproductive. In general, as some of our organisations stated at the time of its publication, the F2F Strategy was not capable of identifying the key policy changes needed in order to revert the current situation and allow a paradigm change in line with the expectations of EU citizens.
For instance, despite the changes proposed, the free trade political agenda of the EU has remained in clear contradiction with the objective of the strategy. In addition, sustainable access to land and other natural resources, in line with nature protection goals, and the guarantee of fair prices for production has been excluded from the action plan. Those aspects should be instead the starting point for building a transition strategy and for ensuring generational renewal in agriculture.
A new ambitious plan to reboot food systems in Europe and elsewhere is needed, putting the most vulnerable groups of society at the centre, ensuring the human right to food is implemented while respecting the rights of food producers to a fair income.
The Reboot Consortium is therefore building a policy roadmap that identifies the key policy changes at different levels to be implemented in the coming years in order to scale up agroecology. This roadmap has been built with the EU Green Deal objectives in mind, as well as international obligations outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the Paris Agreement Climate Objectives, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and other internal law and human rights law more generally.
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Reboot is an EU-funded project involving 14 organisations from 9 countries, all advocating for a fair and sustainable food system. Our mission is to support those most affected by industrial agriculture and its harmful consequences, such as climate change and human rights violations—particularly in the Global South and, in the future, especially the young generation. Our vision is a food system that is based on agroecological farming, where food is not only healthy the people but also for the planet. We call on everyone to REBOOT THE FOOD SYSTEM.
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Contact information
Ivan Mamana
IT, EN, FR, ES
ECVC staff
ivan@eurovia.org
+32 2 217 31 12