The BEATLES project contributed to the EU Commission consultation on sustainable EU food system on July 21st 2022
In the context of the ‘‘European Green Deal”, the European Commission adopted a comprehensive Farm to Fork Strategy, which recognises the strong links between healthy people, healthy societies and a healthy planet and aims to address comprehensively the challenges of sustainable food systems. To drive the shift to a sustainable food system, the Farm to Fork Strategy has launched numerous actions, however the Strategy recognises that these individual and sector-specific actions can neither alone, nor in combination with each other fully ensure policy coherence at EU and national level, mainstream sustainability in all food-related policies and strengthen the resilience of food systems. For this reason, the BEATLES consortium highlights the need for the following changes to ensure a “sustainable EU food system”:
- encourage long-term and large-scale transitions to sustainable, productive, and climate-smart agri-food systems
- ensure a holistic food systems approach
- recognise the role of all actors in the system for a full transition
- ensure coherent implementation of all objectives set at EU level
- facilitate more sustainable practices addressing key barriers such as availability of sustainable inputs, unfair incomes, lack and loss of knowledge and advice, lack of healthy and affordable options for consumption, misuse of resources and food loss and waste, lack of good governance of food systems, and policy incoherence
- provide incentives to encourage sustainable production/processing/distribution/consumption methods and techniques
