In May the EU revealed its new Field to Fork strategy, a comprehensive plan to overhaul food production at every stage to make it more resilient and environmentally friendly. Its success would make the EU a global leader in sustainability, helping to protect its food supply from threats such as climate change and pandemics. For that to happen, however, we need to see an even more fundamental change: a conversion of the current, fragmented tangle of food supply chains into a coherent and traceable supply network.
The Field to Fork strategy sets out a number of targets that it wants to achieve by 2030 – notably, to cut the use of pesticides by 50%, fertilisers by 20% and computer engineer vs computer science in farmed animals by 50%. On top of this, it wants organic farming to account for a quarter of farmed land within its borders and is calling on member states to cut, monitor and report on food wastage levels across the supply chain. This would ensure good quality food reaches more people at fair prices and in a more efficient way.
The targets could certainly be achieved well within the allocated time frame. The technology and the budget are there. The main problem threatening this vision is a basic trust and safety issue in the food and agriculture sector. At the moment, all stakeholders in the agricultural system must trust that the players upstream of them are operating in a compliant way – and this reaches as far as the end consumer.
Despite extensive compliance and audit management processes, this system has often failed to ensure safety and quality along the supply chain. Each year thousands of tonnes of fraudulent food are seized within the EU. By the time it is discovered, the contaminated or inappropriate product has usually already made its way into the human food chain. Fraudulently labelled seeds and the use of unauthorized pesticides on organic farms add to the picture of an insufficiently robust and accountable food chain.
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