Tag: sustainability

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Geographical Indications as One Health Instruments

Integrating Results-Based Environmental Payments into the EU Quality Framework

By Pablo Palencia 

Pablo Palencia is a veterinarian and consultant with over 25 years of experience in One Health and agrifood strategy. He served as the Regional Minister for Rural Development, Livestock, Fisheries, and Food in Cantabria, Spain. Throughout his career, he has led the development of strategic projects for cooperatives and the establishment of PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) frameworks, focusing on integrating living heritage and ecosystem services into legal structures to ensure the resilience of livestock production systems.  info@iberap.com

European Geographical Indications (GIs), including Protected Geographical Indications (PGIs), were originally designed to protect product names, prevent imitation and reinforce rural value creation. Today, however, they sit at the intersection of trade policy, sustainability, public health and territorial resilience.

GIs are no longer only internal EU tools. They are already embedded in international trade diplomacy. They are explicitly negotiated in the EU–Mercosur agreement and EU–India trade discussions.… Read the rest

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Europe’s future of food – articulating food security, sovereignty and sustainability

I was pleased to be invited to give a talk at the EIT Food conference on the future of food last Thursday where the organisers had given me the very ambitious title at the head of this post. I reproduce below the talk as I presented it, with one small modification. The great advantage of attending a conference of this kind is that one is alerted to new perspectives and new angles and, in the light of listening to some of the other excellent contributions to the conference, I slightly nuanced one of my conclusions below (I note the specific change at the end of this post).

My key message is that there are inevitable trade-offs in the transition to a sustainable food system, but that the discourse around a threat to food security is not helpful or correct and masks other trade-offs which policymakers should address more directly. I have included the slides in this blog post, but the presentation can also be downloaded directly if anyone is interested.… Read the rest

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Price formation in the market for organic products

The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM, the competition authority) has recently published the second of a series of reports intended to examine if there are market failures that would hinder the development towards sustainable agriculture. Both the 2020 Agro-Nutri Monitor and the 2021 Agro-Nutri Monitor contain an English language summary on which this post is based. The reports are based on research undertaken by Wageningen Economic Research on behalf of ACM.

The reports focus on the markets for organic products, while recognising that there are other sustainability labels in the Dutch retail sector. Given the ambition in the Farm to Fork Strategy to increase the area under organic agriculture to 25%, the question asked by the ACM is of wider European interest.

Food markets are generally either oligopolistic (a small number of suppliers) or oligopsonistic (a small number of buyers). Farmers often have only a small number of processors to choose between, while retail sales are dominated by a small number of purchasing organisations, which potentially gives these organisations pricing power.… Read the rest

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Agriculture in the European Green Deal

The Commission published its Communication on the European Green Deal in mid-December 2019. Previously flagged in Commission President von der Leyen’s Political Guidelines for the new Commission, it defines the key political objectives of the new Commission for the next five years.

The headline commitment is to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 (while conflating the EU with Europe may seem like over-reach by the Commission, it should be remembered that other European countries, most recently Switzerland, either participate in or are linked to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the UK government’s preference is that it will remain associated after Brexit).

But the Green Deal goes well beyond just climate policy and is intended to address environmental sustainability issues more broadly, including the protection of natural resources and the minimisation of resource use. The broad scope of the Green Deal is illustrated in the diagram below taken from the Commission Communication.… Read the rest

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The start of von der Leyen’s Commission Presidency

Ursula von der Leyen, then the German Minister for Defence, emerged as the surprise choice of the European Council leaders at their meeting on 21 June 2019 following their inability to agree on any of the Spitzenkandidaten. After an amazingly short period to read herself into the brief, she presented her Political Guidelines for the new Commission and summarised these in her oral presentation as part of her confirmation hearings in front of the European Parliament on July 16 2019.

Leaders of four of the Parliament’s political groups (the EPP, S&D, Renew Europe and the Greens, sometimes called the pro-EU parties to distinguish them from the more Eurosceptic parties both on the left and on the right – it is a handy tag though I am not comfortable using that description which is inherently exclusionary) had attempted to come together and, for the first time, to forge a common political platform and a common candidate for the Commission Presidency.… Read the rest

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Karl Falkenberg’s reflections on the CAP

Karl who, you might well ask? Well, Mr Falkenberg has just published a reflections paper setting out a European vision for sustainability which goes into some detail about his views on the future of EU agricultural policy. Indeed, one-fifth of his relatively short document is devoted to this topic. You might well shrug that yet another viewpoint added to the hundreds of others (including those aired on this blog) discussing how Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy should be reformed after 2020 is hardly worth getting exercised about. But Mr Falkenberg’s views may deserve more attention than most.

After all, Mr Falkenberg spent more than six years as Director-General in DG ENVI after a distinguished career in the Commission civil service including a stint as Deputy Director-General in DG TRADE. Perhaps more important, he was appointed in September 2015 as a Senior Advisor for Sustainable Development to the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker.… Read the rest

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Leaked Commission figures sound death knell for biodiesel

Euractiv has a post purporting to contain the default carbon emission values to be assigned to biofuels made from feedstocks such as palm oil, soybean or sugar beet when the European Commission releases its proposed legislation on biofuels and indirect land use change later this spring, based on a leaked draft of the proposal.

Any application of the leaked values would severely hamper the ability of biodiesel manufacturers to enter into the EU’s new biofuels certification plan, announced last August.

Assuming that the EU does not relax its overall target for renewable energy in transport fuel (10% by 2020), if biodiesel fails to make the grade this would raise the demand for bioethanol made either from domestically-produced sugar beet or imported either from Brazil or Southern Africa.

This post was written by Alan Matthews.… Read the rest