Food Security and the Role of the EU

La sicurezza alimentare e il ruolo dell’UE

Abstract

Since the very beginning of the European Economic Community (progenitor of the current European Union) the Treaty of Rome, at its Article 39, has expressly constitutionalized food security as one of the aims and objectives of its Common Agricultural Policy. Still today, Article 39 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) requires EU institutions to assure the availability of food supplies even by increasing agricultural productivity – if necessary – and by ensuring a “rational development” of the agricultural sector as a whole (whereas the legal concept of “rational development” seems open to be as well read as “sustainable development”). This legal basis has led Europe to play, in the geopolitical framework, a strategical role which seems to have been to some extent abdicated during the last three decades.
In most recent years (particularly at the beginning of the current decade), Europe is experiencing brand new challenges: on the one hand, the unexpected reappearance of global food emergencies which most countries, most scholars and most observers had too quickly considered substantially overcome (at least in the EU area and – more generally – in the western part of the world): emergencies that, in a framework of post-pandemic and war upheavals, perhaps call for more flexibility about the decoupled approach of the agricultural aids system; on the other hand, a need (and a clear political choice) for rethinking CAP in terms of more (environmental and climate) sustainability.
In this context, Europe plays a central role in both directions (guarantee of food availability but also of food chain sustainability), which often seem to diverge.
Its more recent CAP reform (covering the period 2023-2027) reveals a very little degree of novelty, as regards its general approach, compared with the overall setting of former 2014-2021 CAP, while the recent launch of EU’s climate change strategy (‘Green Deal’), strictly connected to the s.c. ‘Farm-to-fork Strategy’, implies a constant reduction of environmental impact (and perhaps an extensification of agricultural production). The keywords to combine these two orientations could be ‘R&D’ and ‘innovation’, but EU’s legal environment sometimes seems all but favourable.