A public consultation, launched on 28 September, is open until 26 October on the European Commission’s roadmap for a future EU regulation on a sustainable EU food system.
This ‘European Green Deal’ initiative is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2023. Its finalisation will be preceded by a second public consultation of all interested parties in the first quarter of 2022.
The initiative aims to make the EU food system sustainable and to include sustainability in all food-related policies.
It will define general principles and objectives as well as the requirements and responsibilities of all players in the EU food system.
More specifically, it will set : - rules on sustainability labelling of food products, as provided for in the EU’s ‘Farm to Fork’ (F2F) strategy to empower consumers to make sustainable food choices; - minimum criteria for sustainable public procurement of food ; - governance and monitoring.
According to the Commission, this initiative aims to address the following issues - feeding a rapidly growing world population remains a challenge with current production patterns; - food production leads to air, water and soil pollution, contributes to biodiversity loss and climate change, and consumes excessive amounts of natural resources while a significant proportion of food is wasted; - unhealthy diets contribute to obesity and diseases such as cancer; - the EU food system is characterised by different approaches and analyses at EU, national and sectoral levels with regard to sustainability aspects, which undermines the achievement of the ‘European Green Deal’ and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
To access the consultation and the initial impact assessment: https://bit.ly/3zRL5Na (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)