The EU’s New Agenda on Food and Farming

By Ann-Christina Lauring KNUDSEN, Assistant Professor, Department of European Studies, Aarhus University (Denmark).

Food is fundamental in all societies, and for the past century all industrial states have been regulating the production and marketing of foods to some extent, and developed national standards for what is seen as good diets. Although the European Union is not a state, one of the key activities since its creation has been the support and regulation of food production. The regulation of food standards is a relatively new activity for the EU, one that has been growing particularly since the early-mid 1990s, and indeed one which receives increasing public attention on across the EU. Food and farming are two closely related policy areas, but the EU’s engagement in them stem from different historical and political processes.

The common agricultural policy (CAP) has throughout the history of the EU been the single largest and most costly policy. The CAP was created in the 1960s with the aim of supporting farmers incomes through guaranteed and stable prices for their products. It was created against the background of similar policies that already existed in the founding member states. Hence, the EU’s old agenda in farming placed food producers at the centre of attention, and essentially provided a welfare policy to support the incomes of a sector that was crucial, yet in constant social and economic decline. The extensive EU support of farm production resulted in a series of unintended consequences, For instance, there were repeated critiques from third country trading partners who saw it as distorting world market competition, and internally in the Community, there was surplus production of a range of agricultural commodities that became known to the public as wine lakes and butter mountains. However, the political will was absent until the early 1990s for changing the fundamental policy principles of the CAP. The old agenda on farming therefore remained dominant for three decades.

Since the early 1990s, the CAP has undergone a thorough transformation. Most crucially, there has been a shift away from the quantitative support of farm products, to an emphasis on rewarding qualitative aspects to farming and farm products. Although the CAP now provides farmers with direct income support – rather than support based on production output – a series of qualitative conditions are being imposed for receiving support including measures of sustainability and natural heritage preservation, as well as food quality and safety. EU-wide measures for sustainability and food quality and safety became increasingly topical in the wake of the ‘mad cow’ scandal of the 1990s.

In addition to this, the EU’s gradual entry into health regulation has brought nutrition and food in focus. Obesity, for instance, is on the rise throughout the EU, and is seen as a health problem that defies the borders of the member states. Poor food habits among both children and adults have been brought to attention of the general public, not least by celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver and Paul Bocuse. The European Parliament has been broadly supportive of these moves towards food labeling, safety, and dietary recommendations, in its quest to meet the EU’s consumers. And the European Commission has seen the socio-economic agenda in this respect, pointing out that obesity is about to cause problems to the EU’s work force, and thus may hinder the competitiveness of the EU’s economy.

The direction of the EU’s new agenda on food and farming is towards an emphasis not only on food producers but also consumers. It has moved from quantifiable economic measures to include the definition of qualitative measures. It is moving in the direction of prescribing good and bad food health and nutrition, something which historically has been the task of the member (nation ) states. This development is part of outlining the contours of a new European project that is incorporating common ‘soft’ values, next to the ‘hard’ economic goals. The purpose of this lecture is to give an introduction to the EU’s new – as well as old – agenda in food and farming, and to discuss reasons for this development.