Meedendorp, who is taking part in the strategic dialogue, did at least welcome the Polish commissioner’s “focus on young farmers, land use” and preventing price-gouging.
Olivier De Schutter, co-chair at the International Panel of Experts for Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), said that while some of the proposals were interesting, particularly “as they seek to protect small-scale food producers from excessive buyer power, the whole document is based on the wrong premise — namely, that farmers’ livelihoods and environmental objectives such as soil health and biodiversity are conflicting.”
“They are not,” said De Schutter, who was the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014. “[N]o scientist would endorse the view that long-term food security depends on removing environmental conditionalities imposed on farmers … [r]egrettably, the paper by Commissioner Wojciechowski is based on political calculation rather than on sound scientific expertise.”
The most troubling element, according to Dutch academic Jeroen Candel, is how the document pushes a twisted conception of food security, which “has nothing to do with food security challenges in a real sense, and everything with food security discourse aimed at maintaining the current agricultural system.”
“This is simply ridiculous,” he concluded, and “[s]elling this as necessary for food security is just bollocks.”
