Small farmers from around Europe heard the agriculture commissioner give a ringing endorsement for how the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) feeds the world: “Europe is food-secure. At no point throughout these tough years have we ever been food-insecure.”
Speaking at a recent civil society event in the European Economic and Social Committee, he quoted statistics on how the EU is the world’s biggest food exporter, able to utilise its smaller agricultural areas to produce more food per hectare than other countries.
As speakers representing small farmers took the floor, a grimmer aspect emerged, in which small and family holdings get squeezed out of markets by globalised patterns that favour very large, consolidated, organised and intensive producers.
Losing out to urban expansion and a land grab that knows no borders or continents – from South America to Canada, from the US to Romania, Spain and Malta – small farmers have been losing the right to access lands they traditionally farmed. That was the gist of the event, a proposal for new European rules to prevent this land grab.
Already, small farmers are being prevented from contributing to food production by another ruthless force – climate change. As increasingly frequent and long unseasonal droughts deplete the health of and erode our soils, deprive us of precious water resources and destroy crops, small farmers are on the front line. They are the most vulnerable, the first victims, often uninsured and unable to raise sufficient cash to resume their activity.
What is the role of the CAP in all this?
The statistical sources the commissioner quoted (Eurostat’s Food Chain Report November 2022) show a damning picture of how 806 farmers are quitting their farms in the EU every day.
Since 2005, farmers in the smallest holding size category (<2ha) have dropped by over five million – a staggering 37 per cent of total EU farmers.
Unsurprisingly, the only category which grew over that period – by a lot – was that of the largest (mostly corporate) farm holdings, above <100ha.
This same dynamic plays out in different ways across the EU: locally by way of comparison, four of every five farms are smaller than 2ha, and while their number swelled after joining the EU, since 2010 their number has fallen by nearly 15 per cent.
By rejecting a commission proposal in 2008 to set a maximum capping for financial aid, the Council of Ministers paved the way for the CAP to support the largest export-driven companies in taking the lion’s share of taxpayer money intended to support farmer income across the entire community. And in doing so, elbowing small farmers out of the sector and absorbing those lands, while growing their own agricultural income (and profits) by 26 per cent since 2015!
Thanks partly to effective lobbying by the pan-European farm lobby, the EC did not propose capping again for any of the subsequent CAP periods and, last year, the main parties in the European Parliament rejected proposals by the Greens to introduce this mechanism, which by itself could save many family-run farms. A redistributive payment for small farmers was instead introduced, which can only marginally tackle the problem.
Maltese horticultural farmers are better off than most in 2023- Justin Zahra
This same lobby group provides thought leadership by setting out the lines and keywords which are then echoed in the Brussels corridors to advance specific interests in the CAP, mostly how to give a semblance of progress without denting the same status quo which is ruining small farmers.
A few weeks ago, this lobby, through one of its farmer-vice-presidents, spoke out on behalf of all EU farmers on three key pieces of legislation necessary to make EU farming more climate-resilient and nature-friendly: the Industrial Emissions Directive, Nature Restoration Law and Deforestation Law.
Unlike 96 per cent of EU farmers, however, this vice-president manages 360 ha of agricultural land, 170 cows and 200ha of forest in Sweden.
The keyword and concept peddled for the last couple of years has been that to ensure ‘food security’ for EU citizens, the current CAP status quo must be preserved – bolstered by additional taxpayer money. The re-introduction of production quotas to rebalance markets are dismissed out of hand by EC officials. Mechanisms which reconnect consumers to the produce of more ecologically sound, small and medium farming from their own communities – food sovereignty, effectively – remains for another day.
In delaying or rejecting urgently needed changes that would truly help preserve the natural assets that underpin food production (soils, biodiversity, water, and climate change mitigation and adaptation) in the name of ‘food security’, the EU exposes more poor people around the world (ever the first victims of food insecurity) to the risk of food insecurity, not less.
Maltese horticultural farmers are better off than most in 2023, as a new CAP Strategic Plan has kicked in, for which the government introduced better income support.
Measures are now available to pave the way for those farmers looking forward to and ready to grasp the future, rather than trying to rewrite the past, to make their production climate-smart and resilient.
If the Food Policy announced by Minister Anton Refalo recently can spur further changes in agriculture and other contextual policies, spurring farmers to get organised and gain a greater say within their own value chain as the dairy and tomato sectors have, they may well start to reverse the trend.
Looking closely and critically at what the words used in the public spheres beyond Malta’s shores really signify, and whose interests they really serve, will be an important part of that journey, because words matter.
And the words ‘food security’ in the EU today spell no good news for small farmers.
Justin Zahra is a former director of agriculture and has led the agriculture and rural payments agency. Today he works in the European environmental non-profit space.