‘Yes’ to food security and innovative and sustainable agriculture, ‘no’ to the green “ideology” that is detrimental to European farmers and transatlantic trade.
This is how Conservative MEPs and US officials, including Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, expressed, on Wednesday 29 July, their shared concerns about the EU’s ‘Farm to Fork’ (F2F) strategy for sustainable food systems.
This message was hammered home during a videoconference organised by the ECR Group in the Parliament on ‘Food security in a Post-Covid world: Innovation and Farm to Fork Strategy’.
Sonny Perdue said he was “very concerned” about the EU’s ‘F2F’ and ‘Biodiversity’ strategies, which he described as “extremely prohibitive”. “We want to expand our trade. Protectionism is unhealthy for Europe and the United States”, he said.
He regretted that in Europe, “we denigrate our food when our food is so affordable and we give consumer choice”.
Considering that Europe has “forgotten the ‘farm’ in Farm to Fork”, that it “deprives them of tools”, he insisted on the importance of respecting the three pillars of sustainable development on an equal footing, without forgetting “economic and social sustainability”.
EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski acknowledged that European farmers are very concerned and that improved farming practices and lower productivity in European agriculture will lead to more import requirements. But he wanted to be reassuring.
“It’s not a barrier to trade. The EU is the largest producer of food. It is interested in trade with the United States and other countries. The Green Deal is not against international trade. There’s no controversy. We should act together to increase trade”, he said.
Reducing import requirements is not protectionism either. “We need a lot of protein for animal feed. The goal is also to increase the quality of these foods”, the Commissioner explained.
According to him, “U.S. farmers do not need to be concerned about the Green Deal. No farmer will be forced to achieve the highest standards. They will only be encouraged to ensure better protection of the environment, to create alternatives to intensive agriculture”.
He also added that: “It won’t be easy, but industrial agriculture is productive in the short term, not in the long term”.
Food security remains the main priority of the Common Agricultural Policy, he reiterated. He said the implementation of the ‘F2F’ and ‘Biodiversity’ strategies and their impact on farmers and competitiveness should be monitored.
For the American Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy, reducing pesticide use by 50% by 2030 is “a suspect idea” and some proposals contradict the goals of sustainability and resilience. He noted that the United States has managed to increase organic farming by 25% while using pesticides.
Stressing that the US has been quicker to embrace biotechnology, he pointed to the fact that the EU has banned Bt GM crops, “but exports products to developing countries that can be harmful to the brain”. For him, the EU will not be able to reach its goals, since its view is “ideological” and not guided by caution.
Along the same lines, Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch said efforts should focus on ways to guarantee food supply security and prevent the economic collapse of farmers. "Covid should help us understand what really matters and avoid ideology”, he said, criticising “ignorant NGOs” when it comes to innovative technologies.
ECR party secretary-general Richard Milsom expressed concern that the EU risks losing a comparative advantage “if it persists in rejecting certain new technologies, such as GMOs”.
The Commissioner replied that the Commission had a “positive approach” and that decisions were made “on the basis of scientific evidence”. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)