On 15 March, the European Commission presented a new set of measures focused on simplifying and reducing the Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) heavy bureaucratic burden on the bloc’s farmers and bolstering their supply chain position.

The EU executive’s package notably exempts farms smaller than 10 hectares from checks on compliance with environmental requirements among a host of measures to cut agricultural red tape.

Arriving after months of protests spurred by restrictive environmental policies added to the CAP last year, the Commission’s latest olive branch to farmers will assuage some of their concerns, yet it is unlikely to completely dispel the feeling of distrust that has grown in the agricultural sector.

With fair competition and red tape-cutting calls from protesting farmers and EU leaders growing louder, Brussels will need to take rapid, decisive action to support the bloc’s beleaguered farmers while progressing a just green agriculture transition and avoiding unforced food policy errors.

Farmers’ winter of discontent

Hit hard by the war on its border and still recovering from the pandemic, the EU’s crisis-hit food producers have been further frustrated by Brussels’s counterintuitive regulations.

The Commission’s often heavy-handed approach to food policy has managed to create dissatisfaction among all major stakeholder groups, from farmers and national leaders to green activist groups and consumers, with the elusive balancing act between agricultural and environmental imperatives remaining one of the greatest policy puzzles of our times.

On foot or on tractors, the bloc’s disgruntled farmers have created a European winter of discontent to ensure its concerns are finally heard in Brussels, with protesting farmers from France to Poland denouncing EU measures as harmful to small producers, namely by tilting the competitive scale towards large farms and mass production, as well as towards imports from developing countries.

Some EU leaders have come out in support of the protesters, accusing the EU of overreach and calling on European policymakers to ensure fair competition in the agricultural sector.

Pressured into easing the bureaucratic burden on small farmers, the European executive has moved towards a compromise position, but even as it accepts to soften its hand in one place, it squeezes even harder in another.

Indeed, the Commission’s regulatory efforts remain steeped in misguided practices, with several proposals currently under discussion sure to continue angering large segments of the continent’s food producers and consumers.

Brussels’ old habits dying hard

While easing the burden for some farmers with its proposed reform package for the CAP, the EU is tightening the grip through other instruments, such as the recent adoption of the revised Industrial Emissions Directive (IED).

This set of regulations unjustifiably expands sustainability red tape for small EU pig and poultry farmers while exposing them to unfair competition from lower-standard imports.

The low size threshold for livestock farms means that rather than going after large, industrial producers, the regulations are most likely to impact family-run farms, which are already vulnerable to shocks and less able to absorb losses than large-scale businesses.

Criticism has also been levelled at the efficacy of the measure, which is only expected to lower the harmful emissions of the affected farms by a meagre 3%, barely putting a dent in Europe’s massive contribution to climate change.

Worrying developments are also taking place at a regulatory level at the opposite end of the food production chain. After lying dormant for over a year, the Commission’s nutrition labelling proposal debate has been partially revived by Belgium’s EU Presidency, which favours France’s divisive Nutri-Score system.

Considered the early favourite when the Commission launched the initiative in 2020, Nutri-Score has since attracted significant opposition from member-states including Spain, Cyprus, Greece, the Czech Republic and Romania.

Nutri-Score’s algorithm has come under fire for its unfairly harsh evaluation of traditional European products, such as PDO-protected cheese and cured ham, which notably undermines Brussels’s recently-bolstered Geographical Indication (GIs) regulation.

Meanwhile, its colour-coded system, described by some “alarmist” and overly-simplistic, has equally been the subject of intense debate.

Some of the confusion surrounding Nutri-Score comes from its assessment of products per 100 gram or millilitre rather than per serving, resulting in disastrous grades for foods high in natural fat and sugar with no consideration for their important nutritional benefits nor their place in a healthy, balanced diet.

Essentially, EU farmers fear that Nutri-Score will fail to convey nuanced information to buyers and instead act as a scare tactic against certain products deemed ‘unhealthy’ regardless of context, thus posing an additional competition risk for local farmers while further undercutting their supply chain position – ironically, in direct conflict with Brussels’s nascent fair income policy efforts.

Finding new path forward

As the bloc’s chief regulator, the European Commission holds a duty to protect and inform its citizens, both when it comes to environmental issues and to their own health.

However, the seemingly chaotic way in which the EU keeps throwing half-baked policies at the problem risks alienating its citizens, angering small farmers and achieving little in curbing climate change or improving public health.

Given the dire situation of European farmers, electoral pressures and the climate crisis, the EU must urgently reorient its policymaking machine to help share the financial and technological burden of the agricultural green transition.

As the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) new landmark report on the bloc’s climate risks has highlighted, farmers require much greater financial support in this effort, with enhanced EU funding key to “ensure that healthy and sustainable food remains affordable and accessible for consumers” while generating “sustainable incomes for farmers.”

In addition to its newly-unveiled policy package to ease farmers’ regulatory burden, the Commission should therefore offer new financial incentives for green farming, while boosting R&D investment to enable the rapid, cost-efficient scale-up of innovative, Agriculture 4.0 technologies needed to transcend the productivity-sustainability dilemma.

In short, healthy, sustainable foods can be both affordable for consumers and profitable for local producers, but for that to happen “common sense” must be on the menu for EU policymakers.

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