What the outcome of Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture means for forests
18 September 2024
On 4 September 2024, the European Commission published the results of its Strategic Dialogue on the Future of Agriculture, an innovative exercise that, in a period of bitter strife, gathered farm lobby groups and NGOs around a table and tasked them with agreeing on a common vision for the future of European agriculture. The outcome is a thorough report offering policy recommendations about the agri-food sector’s competitiveness, sustainability and resilience. The intent is to reconcile the many pressures on EU agriculture, farmers and nature in the “Vision for Agriculture and Food”, promised within the first 100 days of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term.
Here, Fern examines certain critical aspects.
Fund for nature restoration: “The Strategic Dialogue calls for the establishment of a well-resourced nature restoration fund (outside of the Common Agricultural Policy) to support farmers and other land managers to restore and manage natural habitats at the landscape level.”
This resonates with one of Fern and our allies’ key proposals for the EU Parliament and Commission from 2024-2029: a fund to support foresters and community forest managers’ shift to species-diverse, continuous-cover forestry which would restore biodiversity, make forests less susceptible to climate change and deliver more sustainable local jobs and high-quality timber. For more information please contact Kelsey@fern.org.
Bioeconomy: The report includes recommendations about “Leveraging the opportunities offered by the bioeconomy”, but mostly lists the usual theoretical principles alongside which the bioeconomy should operate: replacing fossil-based materials and energy with biomass-based ones, increasing recycling, increasing the efficiency of resource use via the implementation of the waste hierarchy and the cascading principle and, crucially, improving coordination between biomass suppliers and users to increase efficiency and mitigate risks.
One practical recommendation is to build “concrete actions to further develop the rural bioeconomy”. Little attention, however, is given to the fact that biomass extraction from farmland and forests in Europe is, on average, already at near-full capacity (above capacity in the case of forests). If we want an innovative bioeconomy that adds value to rural communities to grow, then wasteful uses of biomass must go. Dedicating 70% of Europe’s farmland to meat production or rewarding energy companies to burn wood under the EU’s renewable energy policy are a case in point. Sadly this is not explicitly detailed in the document.
For more information please contact Martin@fern.org.
Carbon removals: The document takes a welcome conservative approach, advising caution and discouraging haste on a separate emissions trading system for agriculture (AgETS).
When discussing offsetting, the authors raise the issue of the limited availability of land for agriculture, and caution against incentivising increasing competition for scarce land resources. “The financial constraints of actors outside the agricultural sector are often disconnected from those that farmers specifically face and also from the possible profitability of agricultural production on a piece of land.”
Deeply concerning as it is, the Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF; FW 293) is a done deal, focussing attention on unproven technologies to the detriment of beneficial restoration practices. The Dialogue authors place hope in the clarity that new methodologies of carbon measurement – yet to be ironed out – could bring about. This hope is difficult to sustain in the current CRCF. When it comes to making these methods operational, however, they alert to the risks of designing policies that focus only on carbon and incentivise ‘carbon-farming’, without thoroughly considering broader concerns.
For more information please contact Siim@fern.org.
European diets: The report provides encouraging signs for a much-needed transition towards more plant-based diets in Europe – meat being, by a long stretch, the largest driver of global forest loss, through deforestation both for cattle ranching and to produce soy for animal feed.
The report recognises that average European protein intake, especially animal-based, exceeds scientific dietary recommendations, and makes a clear statement that the EU needs to “re-balance towards plant-based options and help consumers to embrace the transition”. It mentions certain ideas about how this goal will be achieved: most were already proposed in the Farm to Fork Strategy (public procurement, front-of-pack labelling, and tax reduction for sustainable productions); others are new, in particular an EU Action Plan on Plant-Based Foods.
The report also recognises the limits of consumer labelling and states that food producers must be better incentivised to improve the nutritional composition and environmental impact of food – a possible hook for ideas like regulating ready-made meals. Unfortunately, the Sustainable Food Systems (SFS) Law, which the Commission committed to in the Farm-to-Fork Strategy and which could have provided a basis for reducing meat consumption to healthy and sustainable levels, is not mentioned.
Helpfully, the report recommends that the EU establish a methodology to account appropriately for greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which if carefully designed, could finally begin to address the tremendous emissions from meat production that have thus far escaped climate accounting and policy. To tackle deforestation caused by meat consumption effectively, this accounting system would need to include indirect land use change, and be linked to legally-binding emissions reduction targets.
The report recommends that the EU take measures to decrease livestock concentration and reforms animal welfare laws: these could also help reduce meat production to something closer to sustainable levels, but the Dialogue stopped short at recommending absolute reductions in herd size. For more information please contact Julia@fern.org.
Farmer incomes: It is positive that the findings of the Strategic Dialogue clearly commit to banning purchasing below costs of production, to creating an Observatory to examine profit margins in agricultural supply chains, and to calculating average production costs per sector and region. In Fern’s view, it is important that similar measures also be applied to imports: this will ensure fair competition for European farmers, whilst improving livelihoods for non-European farmers, a win-win situation.
Categories: News, Forest Watch, Bioenergy, Carbon removal, Meat consumption
