BRUSSELS — Food security: It’s the new slogan dominating European farming. 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pinned it at the top of her agricultural agenda, promising European lawmakers that she would ensure it in her second term. The Hungarian presidency of the Council of the European Union has said the same, listing “food sovereignty and food security” in its priorities. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which fired food and fertilizer prices to record heights, France, Italy and the Netherlands have renamed their agriculture ministries to include the words. Paris has even launched parliamentary inquiries over the supposed “loss of food sovereignty,” with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal vowing in February to codify its recovery in law.

“On an international scale, there is no great military power that is not also a great agricultural power, because war is a clash of wills — and one can impose one’s will through hunger,” Agriculture (and Food Sovereignty) Minister Marc Fesneau said a few months ago, comparing growing food imports from Ukraine and Brazil to the EU’s risky reliance on Russian gas. 

That’s just wrong. For one thing, agricultural breadbaskets are a lot more numerous, friendly and democratic than petrostates, with food available from dozens of countries at competitive prices. For another, the EU is a net exporter, pumping out more meat, dairy and cereals than it can consume.

“There is more than enough food to feed the world — there’s actually too much food,” said Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City, University London. “Food security is a paradox.”

Affordability is as important as availability. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defined food security in 1996 as when people “have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food.” Economic access is having the money to buy what’s on supermarket shelves.

Yet, though prices did spike in 2022, food is still relatively cheap in Europe. The average share of monthly household outlays spent on food hovers around 13 percent, twice as high as the U.S. but half as much as in China, India, Russia or the Middle East, according to Our World in Data.

Farmers, manufacturers and retailers all argue consumers must accept higher prices and, while some 8 percent of citizens are “food insecure” (meaning they skip meals out of poverty), almost no EU politician proposes “social security” for food, expanding food banks or other socioeconomic measures. 

Maybe it’s about nutrition. The FAO’s definition of food security also states it must meet “dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Nearly one-quarter of Europeans are malnourished or obese, particularly in poorer areas where ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are cheap, fruit and vegetables expensive, and cooking time scarce. 

Yet, again, the current discourse about food security is not about reducing UPFs, cutting salt or sugar consumption, lowering VAT on fruits and vegetables — or even growing more fresh produce domestically (the EU being a net importer). 

So what the hell do European politicians mean when they talk about food security? And who is it for?

Export, baby, export

According to Olivier De Schutter, who was the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014, they’re talking about ramping up production to reduce imports and increase exports, while appropriating the language of leftist rural movements to do it. That includes Via Campesina’s agroecological concept of “food sovereignty.”

“The lead farmers’ union in France, the FNSEA, now invokes food sovereignty in a way that is very ‘neo-productivist,’” the Belgian legal scholar told POLITICO. The idea is that “in the name of producing more, we should not encumber farmers with excessive environmental [regulation], and that we should allow them to produce at affordable prices for consumers as much as possible.”

Yet given that there’s already enough food in Europe, larger output means larger exports. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “we heard many farmers’ unions across Europe, but particularly the French, saying we should increase production at all costs, because we have a responsibility to feed the world,” he said.

Besides the cynicism in slashing green regulation to make more money on international markets, “it’s quite misleading to say European farmers have a responsibility to feed the world,” argued De Schutter. In fact, it’s cut-price imports from the EU that have prevented farmers in the Middle East and Africa from prospering.

“These countries have become totally addicted to cheap food subsidized by taxpayer money through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP),” said De Schutter.

According to Lang, the term “food security” has essentially become a litmus test in Brussels for agribusiness interests. “If a big farmer in the European Parliament says ‘food security is really important,’ he or she usually means ‘allow me to carry on producing in the same way: polluting, using Russian gas as fertilizers, and mining deep water [for irrigation]’.”

Alleged concerns over “food security” have been used to justify killing the Commission’s pesticide reduction law, severely diluting nature restoration rules, excluding most factory farms from the industrial emissions directive, trying to delay anti-deforestation regulations, and converting the EU protein strategy into a “grow-animal-feed-in-Europe” program. 

That last point is important, added Lang, since there’s also a distortion of what foods need to be secured. “There is an obsession about cattle. The amount of cattle, pigs, sheep, poultry, has exploded,” he said. 

“Farmers saying we must get rid of all these environmental dictates, because we need to just churn out more food — whoa. Hold on. What sort of food?” asked the British academic. “It’s horticulture we need, actually, not more of what some of the big farmers want to do, which is sort of an upmarket version of ranching.”

The major farming unions insist it ain’t so. “Food security is not about the x, y, z dishes but rather the nutritional value (energy, macro- and micro-nutrients) that foodstuffs contain and their contribution to healthy diets,” argued a spokesperson for Copa-Cogeca, Europe’s largest agricultural lobby. 

“In that respect, animal-based products are essential and so are fruits and vegetables,” they added. 

The numbers tell a different story though. Even though Europeans already eat too much red meat and too little fiber, more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies support animal agriculture, which comprises only 65 percent of Europe’s protein and 35 percent of its calories.

So what should food security be?

Less concerned with upping output, which only helps farmers in the short term. Shifting to more sustainable farming — with fewer agrochemicals, less intensive practices, and less livestock — is key to long-term food availability, as climate change decimates harvests through flooding, drought and volatile temperatures, concluded the European Environment Agency in March.

Food affordability can be split. Most of us need to pay more for groceries, since the current model requires underpaying farmers and, according to a recent analysis by Oxfam, exploiting migrant laborers. 

Subsidies should pivot so that meat and dairy, which devour vast amounts of land, water and inputs, cost more, and fruit and vegetables less, said Camille Perrin, head of food policy at BEUC, a consumer watchdog. Those unable to cover basic costs can be helped directly.

All of this would have been included in the Commission’s “sustainable food systems” law. Except the Berlaymont has quietly smothered it, as countries buy into the anachronistic regime the rest of us ditched decades ago: that physical health is about counting calories.