The EU must do more for food security

Caritas Europa published a new briefing paper analysing the EU’s response to global food insecurity in 2022. It shows that the EU’s response is marked by short-termism and continues to promote practices against the needed transition towards just and sustainable food systems.

The analysis highlights why and how the EU should provide responsible leadership in transforming our food systems.

EU leaders have repeatedly referred to the impact of the war in Ukraine on the availability and prices of food worldwide, as well as to the need to increase food production, with limited reflections on structural issues undermining global food security, such as unjust international trade rules and lack of political voice and access to resources for small-scale farmers – in all of which the EU has a key role to play.

The EU is too focused on providing an emergency band-aid for the effects of our fragile food systems. This is insufficient and comes to the detriment of applying political attention and resources to find real solutions to the causes of food insecurity.

Transforming our food systems will require time and changing the industrial agriculture model. It will go against agribusiness interests and politicians’ short-term interests. It will require political will to capture the best of scientific as well as traditional knowledge and to respond to what small-scale food producers, environmentalists, scientists, pastoralists, peasants, indigenous peoples and hundreds of faith-based and civil society organisations have been calling for, for a long time.

Along these lines, Caritas Europa’s briefing paper outlines policy recommendations calling the European Commission and the European Council to:

• Urgently increase the EU’s political attention and humanitarian and development support to other regions of the world, especially Africa.
• Prioritise channelling humanitarian funding directly to local actors (including overhead costs).
• Scale up investment in the agroecological transition with urgency.
• Develop and implement a solid plan for a transition period to the deployment of sustainable alternatives to synthetic fertilisers.
• Treat food as a public common good and take a human rights approach focused on the right to adequate food and built on the notion of “food sovereignty”.

In the briefing paper, Caritas Europa also suggests translating the following principles into decision-making processes:

• Set in place robust safeguards against conflicts of interest in multistakeholder platforms (such as the Global Gateway governance structure).
• Set engagement with civil society, through the Committee on World Food Security and beyond, as a key pillar of the EU’s response. Take concrete steps to ensure that such engagement is continuous and reaches a broad spectrum of interest groups.
• Strengthen producers’ associations, cooperative models, solidarity economy and community organisations that aim at enhancing the rights of small-scale producers and farmers.
• Respect for the principle of Policy Coherence for Development, especially in the areas of climate, trade, corporate due diligence, debt, migration and conflict prevention.