Why Europe’s ‘Farm to Fork’ policies collapsed

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The new European Commission, the European Union's executive body, will soon be tasked with "simplifying" agricultural regulations within the Union. "The Commission is taking strong and swift action to support our farmers at a time when they are facing many challenges and concerns," explained Ursula von der Leyen, the current President of the European Commission.

What this German politician calls "simplification measures" are in fact deregulation efforts linked to agricultural subsidies. Following massive farmer protests this year, the European Union has scaled back most of its ambitions for agricultural reform, just four years after this same Commission presented them to great fanfare.

In the 2019 European election, Europe lived up to its environmental ambitions. Four years after the conclusion of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreements, Europe intended to become a global benchmark in environmental protection by radically reforming agricultural systems. This meant greater monitoring of farming practices, drastically reducing pesticide use, cutting back on fertilizers, reducing farmland use to allow for greater biodiversity, and massively increasing organic food production.

In the first year of these plans, there was little opposition. Europe and the global community were in the midst of a viral pandemic and farmers' representatives were carefully assessing the Commission's seriousness about these plans. Given the success of green parties in the 2019 elections, it seemed that this strategy dubbed "Farm to Fork," was the logical next step in a political trend.

For months, the Commission didn't even bother to publish an impact assessment.

Eventually, the USDA published its own independent assessment in November 2020, showing that Farm to Fork would increase consumer food prices, reduce European exports, and decrease overall agricultural production by 7-12 percent. The report attracted little attention.

It was first the farmers' protests in the Netherlands, then in Germany, France, and the rest of Europe for most of this year, that brought the issue to the attention of policymakers. As it turned out, many of the stated aims of the Farm to Fork program were political and unscientific.

Take, for example, the goal to reduce the use of pesticides by 50 percent by 2030. Europe has by far one of the strictest regulatory regimes for plant protection products, thanks to the use of the "precautionary principle." Chemicals, including the very commonly used glyphosate, have to be authorized by the European Council despite safety assessments provided by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

The sustainability objective behind the 50 percent target remains a mystery.

Are synthetic chemicals used in conventional agriculture harmful to human health? Not in the way they are currently used, or else regulators would have stopped their use already.

It is understandable how the European Commission's approach would upset farmers, because instead of proposing a viable and affordable alternative to the chemicals in question, the Commission argued that farmers could choose organic alternatives. But with organics accounting for only as much as 10 percent of European consumers' purchasing decisions, farmers faced the precarious risk of not finding buyers for their products, on top of the fact that compliance costs for organic products were even higher than those they were already facing.

All these factors, combined with the shortage of fertilizers and livestock feed, as well as the pressure exerted by retailers on the purchase prices of all agricultural products, made the situation untenable for producers.

Frustrations are running high for European farmers, because for decades every new regulatory burden has been solved with money.

The message is always the same. "Are you affected by the banning of a plant protection product and the resulting drop in yields? What if we gave you more subsidies?" Farmers aren't interested in a business model that keeps them afloat with public funds, and consumers are looking for greater transparency.

Shoppers want to know the real price of food in the supermarket and when it is heavily subsidized. As it stands today, over 35 percent of the EU's total budget is devoted to agricultural subsidies.

The EU has since moved far away from its 2019 ambitions. The latest "simplification" measures mean that farmers are subject to less oversight in order to access subsidies, and pesticide reduction regulation has been scrapped altogether. The Commission is now hustling to authorize genetically modified crops on the European market, a measure that would have been impossible to pass just a few years ago. The tone has changed in Brussels.

It's no longer a question of reducing farmland but reducing the man-made barriers to managing them. Farmers have won the battle for hearts and minds, but the war to reduce Europe's mountain of regulations on food production is just beginning.

Bill Wirtz is an agriculture policy analyst for the Consumer Choice Center.