The European Commission recently released its Vision for Agriculture and Food, offering a new roadmap for the future of farming. The strategy received a lukewarm response from the industry, with detractors saying it lacked concrete commitments and contained vague wording.

Food Ingredients First catches up with Thijs Geijer, sector economist for Food & Agri at ING Research, to discuss the strategy, unpick some of its key points, and understand what they could mean for the F&B industry.

You have spoken about not expecting any bold or swift action on livestock from the EU  — why? 
Geijer: For food manufacturers and processors, one-third of all food exports is meat or dairy, and it also provides many people with a livelihood. So clearly there is economic importance, but livestock is also a significant factor if you also talk about food emissions and represents around 80% of total agricultural emissions.

We’ll have to wait and see how this is tackled when the “livestock workstream” is set up. It’s very unclear what the ultimate goal of that work would be, apart from ensuring a future for livestock farming in Europe. Reducing emissions is a complex topic as it requires changes in work practices at loads of individual farms. Although it’s vague, it at least provides some guidance that the EU commission will be looking into technological advancements in the livestock sector.

Greenhouse gas emissions have been extensively discussed. What’s your take on the scale of the EU’s ambition in its new vision?
Geijer: It’s a complex topic. On emission reduction goals, you would expect the wording to be aligned with previously mentioned targets — a 55% decrease in overall emissions by 2030. But that specific number is not mentioned, and it’s clear that they [the EU] didn’t want to put that reduction target in the Vision for Agriculture. In a different proposal, it was also scrapped at the last minute. This signals that having a specific number for agriculture is too politically sensitive at this moment, so it’s vague on purpose.

But if you look at greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and how they have developed since 1990, we’re at about a 25% reduction compared to 1990. Projections show that it will go down slightly, but slowly, so it’s not going anywher near 55%.

One of the proposals in the strategic dialogue was to develop more sub-sector targets to make them much more explicit, so there are different expectations from one sub-sector to another. For food manufacturers, that would have been useful because it would have provided policy guidance on what kind of target they should be steering toward.

If there’s no specific policy target, the industry is left a little bit in the dark regarding guidance. It also heavily relies on farming to solve the issue because 80% to 85% of all emissions in the value chain of a food manufacturer happen at farms or in the stage before farming.

But then the question is, how much support will there be at the EU level for farms to make this work and how will this interact with initiatives from corporates in the food industry? How much financial support or incentive will farmers get to help decrease emissions?

Some groups have criticized the EU’s vision for being too vague and lacking in concrete commitments. What are your thoughts on this?
Geijer: Well, I’m an economist and researcher, so in some respects, you would expect or want more in terms of something concrete and more numbers. There aren’t many numbers in this document. I tried to compare it to the EU’s Farm to Fork strategy, which has some concrete numbers and clear ambitions. But these documents aren’t comparable in that regard. 

But I can understand the difficulty for the EU. You can put some big numbers in there, but are they achievable targets or just lofty ambitions that will never be met? The EU also has a tough job as sometimes its ambitions can overlap and contradict each other. On the one hand, it says there needs to be good protection for European produce to be exported efficiently elsewher — open up to markets, etc. But at the same time, it also says that animal welfare standards have to be the same in these countries as in the EU, which makes it more difficult to strike trade deals.

It also doesn’t want any products like fruits and vegetables with traces of the most hazardous pesticides entering the EU through trade, so these are contradictory messages when it comes to trade.  

What can industry take away at large from the EU’s vision? What’s the message if you’re a corporation, a small business, a farmer, or a producer, for example?
Geijer: The Commissioner has mentioned one key takeaway that is applicable to all of these segments: The EU is aiming for evolution, not revolution. 

Evolution is nice for some companies because it means they don’t need to overhaul their business model overnight, but a revolution might be preferable for other food companies and manufacturers. 

If you’re in the plant-based, cellular agriculture, or precision fermentation sectors, I’d imagine you’d prefer more of a revolutionary approach. Whenever I talk to these kinds of companies, they feel like they’re rowing against the stream in a way. But it’s clear that this is not a moment wher this will change.