EU food policy: still important, but more contentious

EU food policy has come of age. In its infancy, the Union’s food policy meant paying farmers to produce enough for Europeans to eat and sharing fish-stocks between newly united countries.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) started life in the late 1950s when war-time famine was still a vivid memory and was followed in 1970 by a Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).

Today the CAP is a victim of its own success and ridiculed for producing a huge surplus of food every year. Meanwhile the CFP is accused of running down fish-stocks to the point where several species are on the verge of extinction.

While both policies are undergoing slow modernisation, new rules and proposals have emerged reflecting new European food concerns. The huge upsurge in food production over the last half century has given Europeans space to worry about problems that would have baffled their post-war grandparents.

Pesticides are no longer welcomed as a way of guaranteeing large harvests for hungry nations struggling with food rationing. Nowadays spraying chemicals on crops to kill pests and weeds prompts fears about consequences for the environment and human health and calls for a return to more ‘natural’ farming methods. There are similar concerns about GM food - though ironically one of the arguments rehearsed in favour of GM crops is that they require less use of pesticide.

Concerns about GMs and pesticides have both, in their different ways, given a boost to the market for organic food. Policymakers now have to decide how to regulate this new demand for old-fashioned food production across the EU.

Another sign of how much Europe has changed since the start of the CAP is the increasing emphasis on policies to tackle obesity. Where the majority of Europeans once worried about having enough to eat, millions are now worried we have too much. Obesity and other ‘new’ health problems have us looking to make our diets as low in fat, salt and sugar as possible. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) says its staff are now far more likely to be researching healthy diets than when it was set up four years ago.

EFSA has just started work on the standards needed for new rules on food labelling laws, which are scheduled to come into force at the end of the year. They will limit the scope for making health claims about the food we eat. Products will have to meet the agreed criteria in order to print health claims on their packaging.

When the CAP began, it would have seemed faintly ludicrous to dispute whether food was good for you, but the world - and EU legislation - has moved on. As this special report shows, food policy is becoming ever more important and ever more contentious.

EU food policy has come of age. In its infancy, the Union’s food policy meant paying farmers to produce enough for Europeans to eat and sharing fish-stocks between newly united countries.