Erik Gerritsen
Despite a heavy under-staffing on sustainable food, the European Commission managed to launch a public consultation on sustainable food before the quiet Brussels summer. The LiveWell team is glad to see that the European Commission investigates food sustainability in an integrated way, looking into production, waste, consumption, but also improving knowledge and increasing policy coherence. Particularly the latter is very relevant: institutional barriers were identified by the LiveWell project as a key obstacle to government support for better eating at national level.
This is not different at European level, where policy solutions to encourage more sustainable food choices are a shared competence between around 10 different European Commission directorates as diverse as Internal Market and Services, Agriculture, Fisheries, Health & Consumers, Climate Action, Enterprise and Industry, Environment and Trade. The good news is that in preparation of the public consultation a remarkable level of cooperation took place. No less than 18 out of the EC’s 33 departments attended a stakeholder hearing on Sustainable Food in November last year. The hope is that the work plans of the next European Commission will make space for this cross-fertilisation to yield results.
An important building block of inter-institutional cooperation on sustainable food consumption is a set of shared objectives. The European Union is already committed in many ways to support better eating, for example through the Millennium Development Goals, the 7th Environmental Action Programme and the EU Strategy on nutrition, overweight and obesity-related health issues. The Europe 2020 Strategy’s Resource Efficiency flagship initiative in 2011 proposed to reach broad agreement on resource efficiency targets in 2013 and proposed a milestone that ‘By 2020, incentives to healthier and more sustainable food production and consumption will be widespread and will have driven a 20% reduction in the food chain’s resource inputs.’ Unlike the EU’s climate and energy targets, the resource efficiency milestones are not a binding agreement. A large question remains on how all European countries are going to meet this level of ambition.
As always with long-term objectives such as improving consumption patterns, we need to be able to measure our development. Luckily there are heaps of agricultural, health and environmental data that can be used to measure progress on our food choices. However some of the crucial ones, such as detailed information on European protein consumption at home and environmental impacts in production regions abroad, are still missing. As the head of the EC’s statistics department EUROSTAT explained at WWF’s resource efficiency conference in October 2011 already – developing valuable EU-wide indicators is very possible but will take time and political commitment. With the forthcoming initiatives to increase the resource efficiency of the EU’s food system, it is therefore crucial that the European Commission will in its Communication on Sustainable Food will propose a smart target on which measurement of progress will be possible.
It would greatly help support the many food stakeholders cooperating already across-borders to encourage better eating, and show that more sustainable food consumption can contribute greatly to achieving a European appetite that fits the planet.
Erik Gerritsen
LiveWell Policy Officer – WWF European Policy Office
