Putin’s war seduces Europe’s farmers away from Green Deal

 

Putin’s war seduces Europe’s farmers away from Green Deal

 

EU farm ministers say it’s now urgent to plant as much animal feed as possible, but greens are aghast.

 

BY EDDY WAX

March 10, 2022 1:25 pm

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-russia-war-eu-food-farmer-green-deal-corn-fertilizer/

 

The conflict in Ukraine has reinvigorated a French push to make the EU a truly independent agriculture superpower — but doing so might mean sacrificing the EU's green aspirations for farming.

 

Russia's invasion of the country known as the "breadbasket of Europe" has exposed just how much the EU relies on Russian fertilizer and Ukrainian corn to feed its farm animals, and keep its exports of meat and dairy products ticking over.

 

While the war in Ukraine is bad news for Europe's farmers, who even before Russia's invasion faced spiralling production costs linked to energy prices, the crisis has breathed fresh life into France's long-standing push for "food sovereignty." But that renewed push could come at the cost of the EU's lofty green ambitions for the farm sector. That's if policymakers acquiesce to growing calls from farm lobby groups not to burden farmers with fresh green tape just as they're being asked to produce more food to make up for Ukraine's shortfalls.

 

The increasingly polarized debate in food policy circles is a stark counterpoint to the oil and gas sectors, where Vladimir Putin's invasion has forged unprecedented unity about the need to go full-speed ahead on the EU's green goals as the best way to disconnect from Russian dependency.

 

But France, current holder of the presidency of the EU Council, is seizing on the crisis in Ukraine to double down on its strategic goals for agriculture — the idea that the EU should become less dependent on protein-rich animal fodder like soybeans or maize grown outside the bloc.

 

“We can no longer depend on others to feed ourselves," French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address on the war in Ukraine last week, slotting the push for food sovereignty directly into his broader agenda for greater EU "strategic autonomy" when it comes to international trade and defense.

 

France has long pushed for Europe to wield greater independence over its agricultural production, although typically that has focused on muscling up the EU's own protein-crop production in order to depend less on imported soybeans from the Americas. With the Ukraine crisis overshadowing efforts to stop imported deforestation from the Amazon rainforest, the green hue is rapidly fading from the food sovereignty drive.

 

In Brussels, the French presidency of the EU Council convened an emergency meeting of agriculture ministers last week to take stock of the crisis, and push Paris's aim of bolstering Europe's food independence. "Nearly all member states in their statements referred to food sovereignty that should be consolidated as one of our political priorities," said France's Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie, who chaired the meeting.

 

While the war poses no immediate grave threat to food supplies for EU citizens, its farm animals might start going hungry unless EU traders can find alternative global sources of protein-rich cereal and oilseed crops, used to feed livestock animals from pigs to poultry.

 

Ukraine provides the EU with 57 percent of its maize imports, 42 percent of rapeseed and 47 percent of sunflower cake, all of which are packed into animals' troughs to fatten them up. But Ukraine's Black Sea ports are shut and trade is non-existent due to the war.

 

“Ukraine has become an important supplier to the EU: the primary supplier for maize, rapeseed, sunflower seeds and sunflower cake and to a lesser extent wheat,” reads a document prepared by the French Council presidency and obtained by POLITICO. To make matters trickier, 30 percent of the fertilizers — used to grow the animal feed — that the EU imports come from Russia, the document states.

 

Most countries have only a maximum of six weeks' worth of animal fodder stored up, according to Alexander Döring, the secretary-general of animal feed manufacturers' industry association FEFAC. Mediterranean countries like Portugal and Italy are particularly vulnerable "hotspots," he said, given that they typically rely on shipments of grain from Ukraine's Black Sea ports. Now traders will have to start looking to the Americas for animal fodder.

 

And it's not just about feed for livestock. The crisis is exposing just how reliant Europe's gigantic exports of meat and dairy products are on all sorts of primary farm materials from far-flung parts of the world.

 

The EU's dominance as a food exporter is underpinned by vast imports of Belarusian potash, fertilizers made using Russian natural gas and Chinese feed additives, while the flipside is that the EU exports lots of lucrative products like wines and chocolates to Russia, and masses of poultry to Ukraine.

 

Not all countries are so enthused about France's attempt to pull up the drawbridge. "There were a lot of member states [at last week's emergency agriculture ministers' meeting] who said we have to do it together as the EU but also look into involving our trading partners," said one EU diplomat.

 

Growing calls

The fretting about feed and fertilizers is spurring calls for the EU to rethink its ambitious sustainability plans for the agriculture sector under the Green Deal, which aim to wean farmers off synthetic chemical inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.

 

The EU farm ministers decided to do “everything to liberate the potential of agricultural production starting from now," France's Denormandie said last week. His comments were championed by powerful farming lobby Copa & Cogeca, whose French member, the FNSEA, is close to Denormandie politically and has called for the EU to build a "food shield" to protect farmers.

 

EU Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski set alarm bells ringing for environmentalists when he suggested the Commission could take its Farm to Fork (F2F) and biodiversity strategies — the parts of the Green Deal that most impact his sector — back to the drawing board in light of the Ukraine crisis.

 

"If food security is endangered, then we need to have another look at the objectives and possibly correct them," Wojciechowski said last week. Those objectives include reaching 25 percent of farmland under organic practices, setting aside 10 percent of farmland for biodiversity and reducing the damaging environmental impact of the overuse of fertilizers.

 

Though Wojciechowski also pledged not to "toss these strategies aside," his comments have fuelled fears that the EU's green ambitions could be walked back, amid a resurgent French food sovereignty push. Economically-squeezed farmers are already worried that Farm to Fork will push down their food yields.

 

The Commission is considering pausing rules obliging farmers to leave a section of their farmland out of production for the sake of biodiversity this year. That land would then be used to grow animal feed, in an attempt to cover the shortfalls caused by the disruption of imports from Ukraine.

 

The European People's Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, called on Tuesday for the Commission to "avoid presenting other legislative proposals that have negative impacts on European food security." A spokesperson confirmed this refers both to the F2F strategy and specifically to a proposal on slashing pesticide usage expected on March 23.

 

The head of the Parliament's agriculture committee, German EPP lawmaker Norbert Lins, has asked the Commission to allow farmers to spray pesticides on the 5 percent of their farms legally required to be left out of production for the sake of biodiversity. This is needed "to prevent the risk of protein shortage," the MEP wrote in a letter seen by POLITICO, dated March 9.

 

But powerful proponents of the Green Deal have shot back, not least German Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir, a Green politician, who has warned that it would be “wrong” to draw the conclusion that the crisis means reversing the EU’s green policy goals.

 

The EU's Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans said in the European Parliament on Monday: "Please, don't believe in the illusion that you would help food production by making it less sustainable."

 

Farm to Fork is "part of the answer and not part of the problem," Timmermans argued, precisely because it aims to reduce the EU's need for synthetic fertilizer, and hence its reliance on imports from countries like Russia and Belarus.

 

Experts disagree on whether now is the right time to be doubling down on the EU's green food goals.

 

"Potentially some aspects of the Green Deal can be too much transformation too quickly or in some cases also can lead to a fall in productivity that Europe and maybe the world cannot afford now," said David Laborde, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

 

Some, however, think that now is the moment to capitalize on changing the EU's livestock-focused food model. "The solution is not to stick to the current agriculture model but to help our farmers change to organic farming and sustainable agricultural methods," Austrian Green MEP Thomas Waitz wrote to POLITICO, describing attempts to weaken the Green Deal as "outrageous."

 

Jeroen Candel, associate professor of food and agriculture policy at Wageningen University, said: “We know that in times of security and economic concerns, environmental objectives often disappear from political agendas. Various interest groups and political actors who opposed F2F from the start make smart use of these fears.”

 

"The real fears I think are not so much about food security but about disturbances in various livestock sectors, notably the pig industry," he said.

 

On Monday, the Commission told diplomats it was open to flexing competition rules to help pig farmers, after months of pressure from farm ministers to step in due to low pork prices.

 

At a time when genuine fears loom about the Ukraine war causing food shortages in grain import-dependent North African countries, some are keen to dismiss the argument that the EU's food system feeds the world, arguing it's mostly high-value meat and dairy products, or wines, that the EU sells abroad.

 

"It's not like prosciutto di Parma is a staple in the slums of Lagos," said Birdlife's Head of EU Policy Ariel Brunner.