Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February tipped a world struggling to cope with the consequences of climate change and recover from the coronavirus pandemic into a full-blown crisis of food security.
The fighting has directly disrupted supplies of food and fertilizer this year, while the resulting energy crisis has saddled both farmers and consumers with higher prices.
European policymakers have made some headway, with the new-look Common Agricultural Policy kicking off on January 1.
As for unfinished business, reforms to pesticide legislation and food labeling have been kicked into 2023. With no sign of the war ending, it’s likely to be another challenging year.
Here’s our look at the winners and losers in food and agriculture after the year’s tumultuous events:
War on Ukraine
What’s this about? Parts of the world already faced hunger at the turn of the year. Within months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the food crisis had gone global. In peacetime, Ukraine supplied 10 percent of the wheat sold on the world market. Its grain exports fell from 5 million tons in February to 1.4 million in March, as Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.
To stave off starvation abroad and throw a lifeline to Ukrainian farmers, the EU set up overland “solidarity lanes.” And in July, the U.N. and Turkey brokered a deal to allow safe passage across the Black Sea for grain shipments. Ukraine’s exports ticked up again. After a wobble in November when Russia threatened to pull out, the grain deal looks set to stay in place at least until March 2023.
The year ahead still looks bleak: A new EU sanctions package, agreed this month, slightly reduces restrictions on Russian fertilizer exports. But this can only go so far: The war continues to disrupt food supply chains and push up energy costs, impacting both production and prices. And the consequences of climate change, as well as fallout from the pandemic and various global conflicts, haven’t gone away.
Winners: Earlier this year, the U.N. called out commodity traders, who, since the war kicked off, have lined their pockets and helped drive up prices, and multinational corporations with considerable market power that have capitalized on the crisis to raise markups and boost profits. Another winner is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has carved out a central role as mediator between Ukraine and Russia.
Losers: Ukraine’s farmers have faced enormous hardship, with their land occupied or mined, buildings damaged, equipment or crops stolen and export routes disrupted. And, even though Ukraine produces more food than it can eat, many of its people still face hunger this winter. Elsewhere, few economies are unaffected by the rising cost of living, which is forcing many to choose between heating and eating. Numbers going hungry in the Horn of Africa, for instance, are surging toward 50 million.
Pesticides
What’s this about? In June, Brussels unveiled its long-anticipated plan to wean farmers off of toxic chemical pesticides. The Sustainable Use of Plant Protection Products Regulation (SUR) builds on the lessons of the failed framework that preceded it by setting mandatory targets to halve pesticide use and risk in the EU by 2030.
The lofty goal wasn’t to everyone’s liking and, six months on, national governments have sent the European Commission back to the drawing board. The team at DG SANTE that cooked up the draft text will need to show how implementation would affect food production — and only when those figures are in, do the Council’s diplomats plan to resume talks on the SUR’s most contentious elements. Hundreds of scientists and environmental groups fear the delay will effectively kill the draft law.
Winners: National agriculture ministers, led by Poland’s Henryk Kowalczyk and Austria’s Norbert Totschnig, have shown how to play EU politics, forcing Brussels into submission with an obscure article from the treaties. Backing them is EU farm boss Janusz Wojciechowski, who opposed the pesticide reduction law from the outset.
Losers: Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides and her team at DG SANTE face difficult months ahead. Even if they deliver all the requested calculations, some in the Council say the draft bill is already as good as dead.
Fertilizers
What’s this about? It was only a matter of time after Moscow used Belarus as a staging ground to invade Ukraine before the war’s shockwaves hit European farmers. By September, with Belarusian fertilizers sanctioned and Russian natural gas prices soaring, farmers in the EU were paying 149 percent more for agrichemicals than the year before. Before the war, Russia and Belarus had supplied 60 percent of the EU’s fertilizer.
Winners: Commissioner Wojciechowski launched a fertilizer rescue plan, but it didn’t quite live up to expectations. Still, the nonbinding document helped the Pole cement his image as a man who sticks up for farmers — or at least tries to.
The other winners are European fertilizer manufacturers. When the cost of natural gas peaked over the summer, many idled production instead of operating at a loss — but that hasn’t stopped companies like Yara, Basf, OCI, Fertiberia and Grupa Azoty from reaping record profits thanks to just how expensive their products have become.
Losers: Farmers are wary of buying overpriced agrichemicals before the next planting season. Public support may offer a much-needed reprieve, but the EU will need to find a long-term solution to the crisis. The situation is even more dire in Africa and Asia, where countries face actual shortages of fertilizers and food insecurity is rising.
Front-of-pack labeling
What’s this about? By the end of this year, the Commission was supposed to have finalized a new policy requiring harmonized, front-of-pack nutrition labeling to encourage consumers to buy healthier foods. A feud between France and Italy, which backed rival labeling systems and split the Council, stalled the process.
Winners: The early favorite was Nutri-Score, the French traffic-light system that warns about fatty and salty contents of packaged food by doling out grades that range from a green “A” to a failing red “E.” Despite criticism that this labeling approach is simplistic and inaccurate, Nutri-Score is still standing, although adjustments to its scoring algorithm will be assessed by DG SANTE in the coming months. France and supporters, including Germany, may be close to winning the fight.
Losers: Hostility to Nutri-Score runs high in Mediterranean member countries, with Italy leading a blocking minority against the French proposal. The Italian government backed a rival labeling system called Nutrinform, which displays a food’s contribution to daily nutritional requirements using the visual metaphor of a rechargeable battery. Still, winning the support of Spain and the Czech Republic was not enough to turn the tide.
A decision has now been delayed, in a setback for Kyriakides, for more work to be done to assess the Nutri-Score algorithm and how it treats Parmigiano cheese and olive oil.
Common Agricultural Policy
What’s this about? The European Commission had one year to assess EU governments’ spending plans for the next CAP, worth €270 billion over the next five years. After decades of criticism arguing the CAP was too top-down and bureaucratic, this new CAP for the first time has handed power to EU governments to design their own farm policies rather than having them dictated by Brussels.
The Commission’s role was more or less relegated to that of a box-ticker, but the new approval process was still a race against time that pushed EU civil servants to the limit. It’s a task they managed to pull off — in the nick of time.
Winners: The fact that all 28 national or regional plans have now been approved is a win for farmers. Farm chief Wojciechowski had warned that he was willing to pick a political fight with capitals over the approval of the plans to get more subsidies for small-scale farmers and animal welfare.
There wasn’t much drama until right at the death, when the Polish commissioner kicked up a fuss over the Netherlands’ plan, highlighting intensive Dutch farming to press his point that the EU’s Green Deal is unfair on Eastern member countries. Ultimately, he was overruled and the Dutch plan was greenlit, but he still won some political kudos from fellow critics of the Green Deal’s environmental agenda.
Losers: Green MEPs and environmental groups, who have long argued that this CAP reform is a hodgepodge, pseudo fix for the dire ecological problems stemming from Europe’s farming model. Their protests have fallen on deaf ears yet again. The Dutch government was also left a bit embarrassed by the fact that its plan was the last to be approved, after laggards like Bulgaria and Romania.
