How can Europe rise to face agroecological transition? Nyéléni Europe’s policy report

How can the European Green Deal, the EU Farm to Fork Strategy, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and land policies rise to the European challenges on food production, decent work, economic prosperity and climate change?

Land politics – who controls what land, how it is used, for how long, for what purposes and to whose benefit – is a central pillar of the debate. As politicians across Europe struggle to balance the urgent need for climate action with the need to strengthen equity and popular support for new policies, the risk of societal discord looms large protests fuelled by farmers, perceptions of ‘Agri-bashing,’ and long-running tensions between conservation movements and agricultural communities.

Each year on 17 April, the International Day of Peasants’ Struggle, we celebrate and demand more rights for the small-scale farmers who feed us, and stand up for a fair and democratic land control as access to land still is an issue for many farmers. The price of agricultural land is increasing in many European countries and land is more and more concentrated in the hands of a few agro-conglomerates. Only a few countries use the ‘capping’ mechanism to set a ceiling for payments to the biggest farms and 20% of farms get 80% of payments.

Land must not be treated as a commodity but as a shared and multifunctional good and European policies must ensure access to land for agroecology and organic farming, for the benefit of all. The EU Farm to Fork’s targets must be realised in the different European policies concerned, in particular the CAP, in order to support a real transition towards sustainable food systems. Interested in learning more about land policies and access to land? A collective of organisations, coming together under the banner of the Nyéléni Europe Food Sovereignty, have released a policy report Roots of resilience: Land policy for an agroecological transition in Europe. It offers policymakers recommendations to counter these unfair and unsustainable trends and take the goal of increasing access to land for agroecology in Europe seriously. The report is now available in English, French, Spanish and Romanian.

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