Sustainable food production in the face of market, environmental and climate challenges

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion entitled Sustainable food production and ensuring a fair income for European farmers in the face of market, environmental and climate challenges, which was drafted at the request of the Polish presidency and complements previous opinions issued by the EESC. The Polish presidency plans to develop a number of tools and keys to support farmers in times of crisis, ensure their income, increase their bargaining power and improve the implementation of the EU legal framework.

In particular, the need to strengthen existing crisis management measures to counter the effects of worsening emergencies such as extreme weather, geopolitical instability and international market tensions is raised.

Food production in the face of current challenges

Food production is currently facing several major challenges that farmers have to deal with. Yield, product quality and prices can be affected by several factors, such as: climate change, which manifests itself in an increase in extreme events, resulting in more unpredictable yields; environmental and health considerations; agricultural market trends; tensions in trade relations and geopolitical events. We wrote about the impact of climate change on food prices in a previous article: Food prices will be volatile in 2025 – experts blame extreme weather .

The EESC recommends that in the face of growing, more frequent and more serious risks, tools should be developed and implemented to support farmers “incomes and provide them with insurance. While the EESC realizes that most tools should cover climate risk, it is also necessary to emphasize and create tools that also cover market risk, the impact of which can be just as great. The EESC stresses that some models are designed to address short-term challenges by responding quickly to shocks, while others are designed to address long-term challenges and strengthen farmers” resilience. It is crucial, the EESC says, to ensure consistency at the European level between these two complementary dimensions.

The EESC points out that income support systems should be available to European producers so that they can develop agricultural practices in line with new market, social, environmental and climate challenges, and recalls the importance of combining attention to economic performance with environmental efficiency. In his view, it is very important that risks are not borne by the producer alone, but are spread throughout the food chain.

Sustainable food production – key recommendations of the EESC

According to the prepared opinion, the EESC makes the following recommendations aimed at developing sustainable food production in the face of market, environmental and climate challenges:

• Develop and implement – within and outside the CAP – short- and long-term tools to support farmers’ incomes and insure them against the variability of natural conditions;
• work at the EU level on an insurance model based on public-private partnerships, complementing CAP tools and meeting the needs of all farmers, taking into account the size and specialization of farms;
• Include counter-cyclical elements in CAP instruments beyond 2027 to respond to the high pressure the agricultural sector is experiencing from markets, often through low or highly fluctuating prices;
• To transform and significantly increase at the EU level the Agricultural Crisis Reserve as a coherent European crisis management tool;
• Supporting the investment capacity of farmers through simple, tailored and non-bureaucratic financial instruments, in conjunction with financial products offered by banks, but also by others (grants, investment funds, call for expressions of interest, call for projects, etc.);
• Consider expanding the Unfair Trade Practices Directive to prohibit below-cost sales by preventing buyers from buying at discounted prices;
• Creating an EU digital center for reporting on market prices, costs and margins across the food chain;
• Develop a new EU policy that will allow farmers to collectively negotiate prices;
• Protect, increase and better target direct payments to active farmers under the next CAP;
• Encouraging countries to continue food production in low-carbon systems and supporting them to minimize emissions and avoid carbon leakage;
• Ensure equivalence of food production standards in all trade agreements;
• Enabling a just green transformation of European agriculture by encouraging more sustainable production practices, including access to seasonal labor and affordable green energy, without creating a competitive disadvantage;
• Protecting farmers from exposure to competitive disadvantages caused by international trade agreements with third countries;
• High-quality agricultural research and investment in education can help address the challenges facing the agricultural sector and increase its competitiveness. Therefore, significant funding for agricultural research from the EU research policy budget is necessary;
• maintaining dynamic agricultural production throughout Europe, including in its less favorable areas. This is an essential element of European security of supply and must remain one of the basic principles of the EU’s common agricultural policy.

Food production and food security

The European Union faces a number of challenges, such as geopolitical tensions, climate change, energy transition and global competition, which directly affect food production. Reduced food production directly affects food security. It is worth noting that currently the main problem in food production is the low profitability of production, so one of the main challenges is the need to maintain the economic viability of farms to guarantee an adequate level of food production. The opinion aims to help prepare tools and measures to support farmers in times of crisis.