Following months of renewed farmers’ protests across Europe, the EU unveiled its highly anticipated ‘Vision for Agriculture and Food‘ on 19 February. According to its primary architect, European Commissioner for Agriculture, Christophe Hansen, this bold new strategy aims to “give back hope” to Europe’s aging and financially-beleaguered farming sector, with its producers reeling from “dramatic climate events,” weak “prices for their products and… political stress.”
Hansen has set out to strike a new compact with EU farmers, projecting a “farmer-friendly” image in Brussels, emphasising trust-building and working with, rather than against farmers, as was largely the case in the previous Commission’s now-discarded ‘Farm to Fork’ (F2F) agenda. Encouragingly, the EU executive has signaled its intention to abandon needlessly burdensome regulations exacerbating producers’ struggles in favour of tangible support to help foster a competitive and sustainable food system – a major step in the right direction for EU agri-food policy.
Unpacking Brussels’s change of course
Brussels’s new ‘Vision for Agriculture and Food’ is packed with ambitious pledges, from cutting red tape for farmers and rebalancing the food supply chain to curbing unfair trade practices and swapping punitive green rules for incentive-driven solutions. In pushing for fairer trade, the EU is eyeing stricter import rules to prevent hazardous pesticides banned in the EU from re-entering through foreign goods, thus leveling the playing field for European producers. On the domestic front, long-overdue reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) seek to redirect subsidies away from large landowners toward small farms, young farmers and those in environmentally-sensitive areas. Simplifying bureaucracy is equally a priority for making EU funding more accessible to the farmers who need it most.
Although environmental ambitions remain – despite the erroneous claims of certain NGOs and MEPs – the approach has shifted. Farmers, the Commission argues, must be treated as partners in decarbonisation, not culprits, while food companies and retailers will be rightly expected to share the environmental burden. Green incentives will replace penalties, with the EU executive at long last realising that the top-down, “one-size-fits-all” approach embodied by the F2F strategy is simply ineffective.
This vision marks a decisive departure from the controversial F2F agenda – which Commissioner Hansen has explicitly disavowed – infamous for setting bureaucratic, out-of-touch targets, like halving pesticide use by 2030, without offering realistic pathways. Commissioner Hansen stresses that the new approach strives to achieve necessary reductions “in a different way,” offering “practical solutions” that steer clear of Farm to Fork’s deeply polarising legacy.
Pesticides regulation, controversial Nutri-Score off the table
In a striking reversal, the EU has officially scrapped the most ambitious—and controversial—F2F component: the overhaul of the EU pesticide regulations. The Sustainable Use of Pesticides Regulation (SUR), first proposed in June 2022, was withdrawn in February 2024 amid fierce farmer protests and mounting right-wing opposition to the European Green Deal. “There is no intention to do anything specific on sustainable pesticides here,” an EU official has bluntly acknowledged, underscoring the policy’s political toxicity.
Equally notable is the quiet abandonment of the EU’s contentious mandatory front-of-pack nutrition label, including France’s Nutri-Score candidate. Making no mention of the label, the new agri-food vision instead prioritises product origin and animal welfare labelling, with the Commission wisely emphasising that consumers need “trustworthy information” amid the recent proliferation of unreliable food package labels like Nutri-Score.
In recent years, Nutri-Score has become a symbol of Farm to Fork’s flaws: arbitrary, misleading, imposed without adequate consultation and harmful to small producers. Among F2F’s most polarising policies, Nutri-Score has generated widespread opposition from EU farmers and governments such as Portugal, Greece, Czechia and Poland, with the system’s slanted algorithm slapping the traditional PDO products – like cured meats, cheeses and other regional stapes that Hansen now intends to protect with product origin labelling – with unfairly negative ratings, misleading consumers and jeopardising farmers’ livelihoods.
Delivering on the ground
By taking the sustainable pesticides regulation and nutrition label off the table, the EU executive has offered the bloc’s farmers an immediate win and a foundation for further progress to make life easier for the industry. Looking ahead, Hansen describes the EU’s new agri-food vision as a 15-year roadmap designed to restore stability to a sector plagued by unpredictability. His message is simple: without certainty, there’s no investment—and Europe’s farmers desperately need both.
More investment in domestic agritech aims to ensure Europe’s farmers can compete globally without sacrificing sustainability. Indeed, future-proofing European agriculture means embracing innovative solutions and providing farmers the funding and technical support to implement them. Brussels wants gene-edited crops and biopesticides to reach the market faster, with scaling up biotechnologies, boosting EU-grown plant proteins and cutting reliance on imported fertilizers equally part of the plan.
Attracting young people to the rapidly-aging farming sector is also critical, with the Commission promising better pay, fewer bureaucratic hurdles and new revenue streams, from carbon farming to bioenergy and circular economy initiatives. Expected later this year, a generational renewal strategy will make land and financing more accessible to young farmers, while food stockpiles are also under consideration to shield Europe from supply chain shocks.
The EU’s new “Vision for Agriculture and Food” offers a much-needed reset for Europe’s agri-food sector, placing trust, competitiveness and sustainability at its core. With the right high-level strategy finally established, the true test now lies in translating ambition into tangible results. Farmers urgently need practical support to recover lost competitiveness while upholding Europe’s demanding sustainability standards. After years of policy missteps, this is the EU’s moment to deliver real change.
