Just days into President Ursula von der Leyen’s second EU Commission, leading European food giants including Danone and Unilever wasted no time in delivering a pointed challenge to new Agriculture and Food Commissioner, Christophe Hansen. In a 9 December letter, the group urges Hansen to develop an ambitious Vision for Agriculture and Food to accelerate Europe’s sustainable food transition, framing this undertaking as equally critical for the industry’s long-term competitiveness.
Central to their appeal is Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform – currently among Brussels’s hot-button issues – with the sector advocating for a new system of environmental payments that increase annually, helping farmers balance green and economic necessities. The Danone-led group is also pushing for boosted funding for young and new farmers to ensure EU agri-food resilience amid the aging sector’s major demographic challenges. Facing a tight budgetary situation, Hansen and von der Leyen will need to convene a wide range of stakeholders to implement this new vision and replace the past mandate’s ‘stick’-heavy regulatory approach with a ‘carrot’ system based on green farming incentives and innovative income support measures.
CAP overhaul anchoring future talks
In his first days in office, Commissioner Hansen has set a bold tone for reform, expressing his support for disbursing a larger share of the bloc’s €387 billion CAP subsidy programme to small, low-income farmers. Long its largest source of criticism, the CAP continues to disproportionately reward agribusiness giants, with the largest 20% of farms absorbing 80% of the budget due to the system’s outdated hectare-based payment system.
Acknowledging the budgetary constraints amid mounting defense and reindustrialisation priorities in Brussels, Hansen has characterised his call for a CAP overhaul that “better targets the support to those most in need” as an “evolution” to re-balance the farming support system in a financially feasible manner. Nevertheless, Hansen’s proposed changes could mark the CAP’s most profound reorientation in its six-decade existence.
This new approach follows the Commission’s recent compromises to dilute the environmental goals of last mandate’s Farm to Fork strategy, largely in response to the bloc’s sweeping farmers’ protests by farmers and MEP pressure ahead of the European elections. Yet, while the latter essentially amounts to shallow, albeit pro-farmer, political pandering, Hansen’s appetite for genuine innovation bodes well for the sector’s future.
Echoing Hansen’s strategic focus, the EU Council approved a set of conclusions on 9 December outlining key priorities for CAP revision, with the bloc’s 27 agriculture ministers stressing the need for farmers’ equitable remuneration, fairer and more transparent supply chains value distribution and bolstered competitiveness across the EU’s agri-food sector.
Dismantling lingering obstacles
This growing momentum for change reflects Brussels’s broader recognition that economic viability must underpin sustainable agricultural practices. On 10 December, Von der Leyen offered her own proposals to bolster the sector’s negotiating position, from mandatory contracts between farmers and food companies to softened competition rules for young farmers and tighter oversight of retail pricing, while Hansen has equally highlighted the exploitative, income-killing practices of major retailers.
Yet, despite these good intentions, the EU executive risks undermining the farmers they aim to support with a lingering vestige of the widely-discredited Farm to Fork agenda: the front-of-package nutrition label proposal. Indeed, the French creates Nutri-Score has once again found itself in a media storm, with French retail giant Carrefour recently mandating that suppliers display the label on all online products, threatening to publicly call out producers that fail to comply.
The EU cannot in good faith back a labelling system which the very supermarkets they aim to rein in are now using to pressure EU producers – particularly given that Nutri-Score has long disproportionately impacted the bloc’s small, local farmers. With its outdated algorithm, Nutri-Score continues to unfairly grade natural, traditional products, such as olive oil, PDO cheeses and cured meats, at the heart of Europe’s culinary heritage and balanced dietary traditions.
Local farmers across Europe have risen against this misguided imposition that undermines their competitiveness and supermarket bargaining power, prompting an expanding group of governments, including those of Portugal, Spain, Greece and Czechia, to snub the label. The agri-food industry’s biggest players, such as Danone, once a key backer of Nutri-Score, are equally starting to drop the label, recognising its misleading impact for consumers.
Even in France, independent nutritional research is increasingly proving Nutri-Score’s opponents right, contrary to the Nutri-Score team’s claims of unanimous scientific backing. The Commission should therefore consistently apply its emerging policy approach and relegate the labelling proposal to the past.
Scaling innovative new solutions
The EU executive must instead focus on novel ideas to bolster farmers’ competitiveness while facilitating the sustainable transition. Commissioner Hansen has encouraged the bloc’s farmers to explore “alternative income” streams to enhance the sector’s economic resilience, citing growing crops for biofuels, planting trees for carbon credit payments and optimising land usage with solar panels and other forms of green energy production.
The latter avenue, dubbed “agrivoltaics,” has emerged as a particularly promising solution over the past year, with the EU already recognising its potential by including funding and support mechanisms in innovation programmes such as Horizon Europe. Paired with tax incentives and credits for green energy and agricultural practices, the EU can help pave the way for farmers to unlock their full contribution to a “resilient, competitive and sustainable agri-food system European food system” – a mission von der Leyen has assigned the newly-launched European Board on Agriculture and Food tasked with de-polarising the policy debate and renewing ties with farmers.
The path forward demands bold leadership. The EU Commission will need to embrace the recent call from industry leaders like Danone and Unilever to balance environmental ambition with economic pragmatism, with CAP reform offering the foundation to launch this new agenda. Delivering targeted incentives and greater support for young and small farmers is not just a policy priority, but a necessity for the sector’s future. Now is the time to move beyond restrictive approaches and cultivate genuine cooperation at the heart of Europe’s agri-food system.
