The European Parliament's agriculture committee adopted, on 8 December, an own initiative report on how the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is meeting EU and world food security needs.
The report looks at how successive reforms of the CAP have shifted the focus of EU agriculture away from quantity to quality production and how this fits new concerns about global food security.
MEPs argue that the new reality of food security is not sufficiently addressed by the current CAP Health Check and urge policymakers to secure the EU's food production base by ensuring a fair income for farmers in both the developing and developed worlds. "This is key to securing food production and if the market cannot deliver this, then policies need to do so," the report argues.
According to the report, the market alone cannot provide income security for producers, who are faced with the high cost of compliance with EU food production, food safety, environmental and animal welfare standards.
Amid fluctuating demand and prices and "critically low" global food stocks, the MEPs call on the EU to take the lead in establishing a global food inventory regime and a global system of food stocks in order to provide adequate advance warnings of dramatic changes in food stock levels. They also ask for the introduction of an obligation to guarantee the availability of foodstuffs at gobal level and improvement of the storage systems of seeds, manure and pesticides in developing countries.
MEPs also suggest that the EU Development Fund should be shifted towards agriculture as the vast majority of the world's poor live in rural areas that are highly dependent on agricultural production.
The agriculture committee's report follows the French EU Presidency's failed attempt to ensure the continuation of large EU subsidides for farmers during the latest EU ministerial meeting at the end of November.
