On Monday, 14 October 2024, President Lili Balogh testified at the European Parliament AGRI Committee hearing on the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture.
The bottom line: Agroecology is profitable, sustainable, just, and delivers on future-proof food system transformation, recognised by ever more political stakeholders; yet misleading counternarratives remain.
Lili Balogh warned that “we have passed the planetary boundaries on so many levels. Climate change is here. Droughts are every day, floods are every day, soil erosion is at its peak. These fields will not produce food for long. Also, the current dominant food system creates a huge bill for the health system, because it’s providing unhealthy diets to most people. Not only does it increase hunger in the world but it also increases the diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes among children and adolescents. Food systems that are not resilient put our whole existence at stake.”
“Farmers are locked into a system in which, for example, only two companies control more than 40% of the seed market worldwide. There’s a huge land concentration in the EU and worldwide and access to land to new generational farmers and young entrants is almost impossible. Over 800 farms are lost every day according to the latest Eurostat figures, thanks to the collective policy failures of the last decades. In addition, income disparity in agriculture is enormous: 30% of European farmers do not receive at all CAP subsidies despite producing food every day for European society. European farmers struggle to compete on the world market. While production prices rise, food prices remain low, impoverishing farmers. The transformation must be about income stability, not yield–we produce more than enough food already. ”
In times of poly-crisis, agroecology, a globally internationally recognised framework, proposes a transformation of the whole food system. Farming with nature and protecting the environment ensures food security. Agroecology is a proof of that; practitioners are finding win-win-win solutions. Long term food security is only possible by climate and biodiversity enhancement.
For that, we need investment in the agroecological transition. Prevention is far cheaper than the cure; budgeting must involve funds besides the CAP, especially independent agroecological advisory service, education, legal and financial support, to help farmers in the transition, save their livelihoods, and survive the climate and biodiversity crises.
We must resist narratives of competitiveness and innovation that are used to maintain the status-quo. Prioritising competitiveness over sustainability ignores ecological realities, while hightech solutions, most of which are yet to be proven efficient, first serve the interests of the most powerful actors in the agrifood system. Agroecology is proven to be profitable, inclusive, and competitive and is highly innovative, bringing novelties to the system in the form of new social and organisational structures, indigenous and forgotten farming knowledge, low-tech and easy-to-repair technologies.
At the hearing, no other environmental or small farmers organisations were not invited and their voices were sorely missing. The strategic dialogue can only continue if it is inclusive, especially of farmers, representative of a balance of interests, and financially sustainable for the participants.