EU’s last-ditch Ukraine U-turn underscores range of more effective farmer support options

Less than twenty-four hours after EU negotiators’ last-ditch compromise to extend Ukrainian agriculture’s increasingly-controversial trade liberalisation benefits, the unexpected deal has already been plunged into uncertainty. On 20 March, European ambassadors refused to rubber stamp the provisional agreement struck by Brussels’s institutions and separately approved by the European Parliament’s trade committee.

Keen to “give a signal” to the EU Council ahead of its two-day summit – where Ukraine solidarity topped the agenda – the MEP vote’s procedure-breaking timing ahead of an ambassadors’ agreement has backfired. After seeing their initial resistance thwarted earlier in the week, Franco-Polish opposition reportedly succeeded in postponing the deal, with Paris and Warsaw vying for more trade restrictions to appease their protesting farmers  ahead of June’s EU elections.

Referring to Brussels’s tentative lifeline for Kyiv, French Agricultural Minister Marc Fesneau quipped that solidarity with Ukraine must not come “at the cost of excessive destabilization” of the EU market.” Yet, before cutting off a crucial economic boon for Ukraine’s war effort, Europe’s policymakers should look to the range of more effective files where they can provide meaningful support to farmers.

Pursuing EU-Ukraine’s converging interests 

While EU farmers have focused their ire on Ukrainian grain and poultry imports, Russia’s widespread wheat dumping has curiously evaded controversy. Since its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has flooded global markets with record levels of cheap exports, driving crop prices down to unviable levels, while spreading disinformation to fan the flames of EU farmers’ protests and isolate Ukraine, whose products have had a negligible impact.

Nevertheless, calls from member-states and MEPs to curb Russian grain imports have only gained ground in recent weeks – a move which would help protect EU farmers from unfair competition while helping Ukraine regain global market share lost to Moscow. More broadly, as agricultural commodities broker Przemysław Błażejewski has posited, EU leaders should avoid blindly appeasing anti-Kyiv farmers and focus on solutions to build a fairer food system.

Certain EU policymakers have rightly identified Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform as a vital avenue for improving struggling farmers’ financial position, which actually goes hand-in-hand with Kyiv’s eventual EU accession. The CAP’s current area-based subsidy payment scheme has created a serious market imbalance between large and small farms, with just 20% of the bloc’s biggest farmers absorbing roughly 80% of CAP funding.

Already unsustainable, this system would decimate EU farmers and the CAP as a whole after Ukraine’s entry given its much larger average farm size, meaning that Brussels must begin drawing up a revised CAP for the post-2027 period that scraps area-based payments to help its farmers and prepare the sector for Ukraine’s entry.

Shelving FOP nutrition label

Admittedly a complex and timely, albeit crucial, undertaking, Brussels has much quicker wins on the table than overhauling the CAP, particularly among its range of misguided ‘Farm to Fork’ (F2F) policy files.

Initially delaying F2F’s healthy food pillar in late 2022 to avoid “polarising the debate,” the Commission has nevertheless remained silent in the face of the Belgian EU Presidency’s latest FOP label efforts – namely to build consensus around the Nutri-Score system at the centre of this controversy. A wide, expanding coalition of political leaders, food producers and nutritional scientists from across Europe – including Romania, Switzerland and Poland and even home country France – have expressed strong reservations concerning the mandatory, bloc-wide imposition of Nutri-Score.

Underlying this broad range of criticism are shared concerns over Nutri-Score’s defective algorithm, which, even in its latest version launched in January, has failed to correct an outdated focus on fats, sodium and sugar, which notably overlooks vital nutrients and consequently fails to direct consumers towards healthy, balanced diets. Europe’s local producers of protected heritage foods have been amongst the hardest hit by Nutri-Score’s “biased” evaluation methodology, compounding their growing competition and income challenges.

The fact that even food giants like Coca-Cola and Mondelez are rejecting the system over feared sales impacts should give an idea of the position facing the EU’s small farmers. Reflecting this situation, French MP Antoine Armand, under the direction of France’s Ministry of Agriculture, has launched an initiative backed by a group of over 50 fellow legislators pushing public health officials to revise Nutri-Score’s algorithm due to its unfair treatment of regional products, with the group highlighting “milk, cured meats and PDO…cheeses” as the “big losers in this classification.”

Balancing the food chain

Beyond the misleading Nutri-Score label, European farmers face broader supermarket challenges, with significant, overdue political attention being shed on farmers’ disadvantaged food supply chain position in light of the bloc’s sweeping protest movements.

In line with the French Government’s recent efforts, Armand’s MP coalition equally aims to support its domestic farmers by encouraging local consumption; however, this agenda must be accompanied with a robust and coordinated EU-level policy action to bolster producers’ negotiating power. President Macron has increasingly called for a ‘European Egalim’ law – essentially, a bloc-wide expansion of French legislation that has offered local farmers stronger income safeguards in their supply chain negotiations with supermarkets and agri-food manufacturers – with Spain recently joining this intervention to tackle an unfair trade system hurting local farmers.

Member-state calls have not fallen on deaf ears. On 15 March, the Commission circulated a set of policy ideas with EU countries, notably including fast, non-legislative measures such as the creation of an observatory monitoring trading practices, margins and costs in the bloc’s agri-food supply chain. What’s more, the EU executive plans to introduce new rules to enhance cross-border enforcement of the EU directive on unfair trading practices (UTP), targeting a “small number of large companies” currently abusing their size advantage over a fragmented farming sector composed primarily of SMEs.

Such feasible interventions, which have been warmly received by farming representatives, underscore how EU does not need to “throw Ukraine under the tractor,” as colourfully phrased by Politico Europe, to lift up its own producers. With Kyiv’s European future an economic, political and security necessity for the bloc, Brussels must begin working constructively with its farmers to build a fair, sustainable and competitive food system.