Next EU term must advance a sustainable agriculture agenda that empowers small farmers

With the European elections just weeks away, a reputationally-bruised Brussels has delivered a major olive branch to EU farmers that it hopes will pay dividends at the ballot box. On 13 May, the EU Council rubber-stamped the Commission’s “simplification package” regulation relaxing the Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) green rules amid continent-wide farmers’ protests. Hailed by the bloc’s agricultural associations, this red tape-cutting measure notably offers farmers flexibilities on CAP subsidy-linked fallow land, crop rotation and compliance rules.

Recently declaring himself “grateful” for the recent wave of protests, EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has credited Europe’s farmers for spurring this rapid CAP overhaul, while pointing to strong eco-incentives rather than untenable, top-down obligations as the way forward for sustainable agriculture. Yet, with a coalition of NGOs rightly criticising the regulation’s lack of solutions for unfair trade practices and market distortions, the EU will need to take wider action to prove its gratitude to small farmers in the coming mandate.  

Free trade compounding CAP flaws

As Poland’s anti-Green Deal demonstration on 10 May has highlighted, the farmers’ protest movement remains alive and well. Yet the roots of this uprising extend well beyond the Green Deal’s ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy launched in 2020.

According to economics professor Dr Emmanuel Martin, these protests largely stem from the CAP’s decades-long transformation from a catalyst of EU food sovereignty to a factory of increasingly-stringent environmental rules subjecting farmers to “rising costs, extensive red tape and bureaucrats nearly making production decision on their own.” Adding to this toxic regulatory cocktail, Dr Martin adds, is the EU Single Market’s growing exposure to agri-trade.

While industrial agri-food giants continue absorbing the lion’s share of area-based CAP subsidies as well as the benefits of free trade, small farmers are left out in the cold. Beyond having to adapt to new green obligations with a dwindling share of EU funds, Europe’s small farms have equally found themselves on the wrong side of globalisation’s double-edged sword.

Unlike the EU-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that entered into force on 1 May, the EU has failed to agree strong quotas and sustainability reciprocity commitments in its ongoing FTA negotiations with countries including Australia, Mexico, Chile and the Mercosur bloc. With the more ‘virtuous’ New Zealand model still largely elusive, Europe’s small farmers remain exposed to crippling unfair competition from large flows of cheap agricultural imports produced with lower environmental and labour standards.

Nutrition label missing the mark

Amid fears that the deep frustrations of its abandoned farmers will spur a far-right surge in next month’s elections, Brussels could be stepping into another avoidable pitfall. Since January, the Belgian EU Presidency has attempted to revive the Farm to Fork’s long-delayed nutrition label proposal, backing the divisive Nutri-Score for bloc-wide implementation.

Yet Belgium faces an uphill battle, with Nutri-Score’s years of opposition only growing. Initially rejected by a member-state group including Greece, Czechia and Cyprus due its biased, punitive evaluation of traditional European meat and dairy products, Nutri-Score’s official adoption has since been blocked by the Spanish Senate and fully banned by Romania’s national competition authority – a fate the French label could also meet in former stronghold Switzerland.

Nutri-Score’s stigmatisation of locally-produced PDO foods across the EU represents a significant and unnecessary competition threat, with Europe’s beleaguered small farmers facing an unfair economic disadvantage they cannot afford. What’s more, Nutri-Score’s mandatory EU implementation would inflict socioeconomic pain in rural farming communities without even achieving its intended public health goals. 

According to leading French nutritionist Jean-Michel Lecerf, the Nutri-Score algorithm’s “outdated” science and “reductionist approach” to nutrition leads to misleading scores. Further countering its backer’s scientific consensus claims, Dutch nutritionists Dr Stephan Peters and Dr Hans Verhagen recently published a study finding that most research favourable to Nutri-Score involved the system’s developers, who Peters alleges have tried to sabotage unflattering independent studies.

State aid’s unintended consequences

Unfortunately, the Commission’s nutrition label proposal is not its only well-intentioned policy that risks inadvertently undermining the competitiveness of smaller agri-food players. On 2 May, the EU executive granted a six-month extension of its emergency state aid regime allowing member-states to provide their farmers additional public subsidies.

Designed as a financial lifeline in light of “persisting market disturbances,” the Temporary Crisis and Transition Framework (TCTF) launched in March 2022 has ironically created new internal market issues according to former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s recently-published report. Due to the vast spending power gaps separating the bloc’s larger and smaller countries, Letta warns that relaxed state aid rules have amplified “distortions of competition” in the Single Market at the expense of the latter.

Poland – the top TCTF spender – has doled out nearly €4 billion in farming subsidies – almost as much as the next three member-states on the list combined. By comparison, only six of the EU-27 have surpassed the €500 million threshold, with the ten smallest spenders not even hitting €100 million. Even Commissioner Wojciechowski has acknowledged the current regime’s inequalities while emphasising its inaptitude as a long-term solution.

Yet with agricultural heavyweights desperate to appease their farmers with fast cash, leaving behind this ‘emergency’ state aid scheme could be harder than expected.

Squaring the farming circle

Moving forward, Letta has proposed an EU-level state aid mechanism for farmers to restore balance in the internal market. All member states would contribute to a common fund for EU-wide agricultural initiatives, guided by strict conditions and clear public policy objectives to avoid wasteful spending.

Emphasising that farmers must no longer be asked to bear the sole financial burden for the EU’s green transition, Letta also calls for EU-wide state aid to finance sustainable farming initiatives. Finally, as Letta and Commissioner Wojciechowski recognise, Brussels must meaningfully tackle retailers’ and wholesalers’ unfair trading practices which keep small farmers at the bottom of the food chain.

Given local enforcement issues, the former is advocating for the EU to empower member-states to tackle competition violations harming local food producers. Meanwhile, the latter has called for a larger, solidarity-based CAP whose stability would be ensured by removing the area-based payment system that has long generated unfair market distortions.

The CAP’s new, streamlined environmental rules provide a solid foundation, but EU policymakers must double down post-election to tackle the root causes of farmers’ unrest and build a truly sustainable, healthy and fair food system.

(Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)