EU must latch on to COP28’s future-fit approach to build healthy, sustainable food system

While negotiations remained a “mixed picture” at the midpoint of the Dubai-hosted COP28 climate summit, its first week notably produced landmark agreements on food and health. In early December, over 130 countries signed up to a declaration on resilient, sustainable agriculture, while 123 nations endorsed a climate and health declaration.

After years of neglect, world leaders are finally focusing on the interrelations between climate change, food production and health. Hailing this new direction, Jennifer Morris, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, has rightly affirmed that putting farmers and producers “at the centre of the solution” will enable our food systems to “be part of the climate solution,” while supporting nutritional health for all communities.

As one of the major signatories of these world-first agreements, the EU will need to embed this holistic approach to building healthy, sustainable food systems as it navigates pending agri-food policy decisions and begins laying the foundations of its “strategic dialogue” with the bloc’s farming sector.

New agri-food vision taking shape

In fact, COP28’s flurry of food and health-related climate action has roughly coincided with the inaugural EU Agri-Food Days conference, held in Brussels from 6 to 8 December. Bringing together the EU’s farmers, food industry representatives and policymakers for wide-spanning discussions on food security, sustainability and digital transformation, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s speech framed this timely event as an informal lead-up to the launch of the Strategic Dialogue in January.

Running through a laundry list of challenges that have plagued farmers in recent years, from the pandemic and energy crisis to soaring inflation and climate change, von der Leyen’s address emphasised the sector’s resilience while highlighting the need to reconcile food production, health and sustainability goals. Indeed, while agriculture is a vital pillar of the continent’s economy, health, security and rural community well-being, the sector continues to leave a significant environmental footprint, accounting for 11% of EU greenhouse gas emissions and fueling biodiversity loss via land conversion, soil degradation and chemical pollution.

Moving forward, Vivian Maduekeh of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food has called on COP28 participants to adopt a holistic policy approach to help accelerate the transition to a “sustainable agri-food system for healthy diets” that can help climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Crucially, as CGIAR food policy expert Purnima Menon has recently pointed out, this bolstering of the EU food system’s climate resilience will help ensure the long-term supply of nutritious products.

Brussels’s faltering agenda due for revamp

With the European Green Deal’s 2020 ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy, Brussels innovatively linked the goals of creating a “fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly’ food system. Yet as the Commission nears the end of its mandate, this agenda’s early promise has faded bitterly. In contrast to COP28’s “farmer-centric” model, the EU executive’s top-down approach and inadequate consideration of farmers’ needs has sharply backfired. While a major factor in several dead-in-the-water sustainable farming files, the Commission’s stagnating nutrition label proposal perhaps best illustrates these flaws.

A Farm to Fork centrepiece, the mandatory front-of-package (FOP) label is intended to harmonise nutritional information across the bloc to help tackle Europe’s rising obesity. Yet France’s Nutri-Score system – which grades products on a green A-to-red E scale – has derailed this effort, dividing member-states due to its algorithm’s unbalanced, simplistic and scientifically-dubious assessment of nutritional value, as a recent study from the Medical University of Warsaw concluded.

Consequently, local producers of European heritage cheese and cured meats have faced unfair competitive disadvantages from negative scores resulting from the algorithm’s narrow, outdated focus on fat and salt content, while macronutrient-poor products such as Chocapic cereal and Diet Coke have received ‘A’ and ‘B’ scores, respectively. After facing widespread criticism, Nutri-Score has developed a new algorithm, which comes into effect at the end of the month.

Yet this updated version has created striking new problems, such as demoting French prunes from ‘A’ to ‘C’ while rating whole milk lower than Diet Coke. Moreover, large food companies, such as Bjorg, are simply dropping the label due to their newly-lowered Nutri-Scores, underlining the futility of this update – not to mention the confusion for consumers who have been misled into buying well-rated products that will suddenly become “unhealthy.”

Beyond private companies, growing member-state opposition to Nutri-Score has ranged from Romania’s outright ban to Switzerland’s exploration of a legislative prohibition years after implementation and Spain’s shift away from the label after its Senate Health and Consumer Affairs Committee approved a motion urging the Government to refrain from officially adopting the label until the Commission’s harmonised proposal to avoid “uncertainties” for its agri-food sector.

Better way forward

To truly help its food producers and consumers create a sustainable, healthy food system, the EU will need to look beyond labelling and focus on more systemic solutions. On the educational front, instead of using prescriptive food labels, efforts to support better dietary choices should provide objective, reliable information as well as more engaging interventions, such as community-based cooking classes with locally-produced ingredients. 

Yet, as expert nutritionist Dr. Lynne Kennedy has written, education will not suffice, as food policies placing “the emphasis…on individual responsibility…only paper over the cracks of the real issue, which is affordable food.” A wealth of research has established the link between obesity and the high cost of healthy foods, with a recently-published The Lancet study highlighting “substantial inequalities…likely to be exacerbated by the global cost-of-living crisis,” and confirming that “families with low income are pressured into buying cheaper,” less-nutritious foods.

Looking ahead, EU policymakers should thus prioritise improving the accessibility and affordability of healthy foods. As Harvard University’s School of Public Health has stressed, by helping its farmers adopt innovative digital farming technologies to ramp up local production with fewer environmentally-disruptive inputs and incentivising the cultivation of diverse, nutrient-rich crops – in addition to subsidising community-based farmers’ markets – Brussels can make the production of sustainable, nutritious foods economically-viable while including all communities of consumers in this transformation.

With COP28 providing highly-welcome leadership in the emerging space connecting climate change, food production and health, the EU should seize the opportunities presented by the current moment to change course. Signing world-first international declarations and launching its Strategic Dialogue with farmers represent undeniably positive steps, but Brussels will need to continue this commitment to humility and bottom-up cooperation to realise its ambitions in a fair, inclusive manner.