Ensuring sustainable food production and a fair income for European farmers in the face of market, environmental and climate challenges

Key points

The EESC:

• suggests developing and implementing short and long-term tools to support farmers’ incomes in times of crisis, within the framework of the CAP and beyond such as:
  • insurance schemes against climatic and environmental disaster: work on public-private partnership assurances model and review the calculation of yield references; 
  • insurance schemes against market tensions: examine the development of innovative levers, such as a parametric insurance, and include counter-cyclical elements in the CAP instruments after 2027 to react to pressure from the markets;
  • risk and crisis management tools: restore the CAP budget to a level of 0.5% of EU GDP in the next multiannual financial framework (MFF); improve and promote at Member State (MS) level the utilisation of the 3% from direct payments as farmer's contributions to the risk management instrument; recast and increase significatively the agricultural crisis reserve at EU level; develop mutual funds at MS level for health and environmental risks;
  • financial tools provided by CAP and banks: support farmers’ investment capacity, in particular for young farmers, with simple, non‑bureaucratic financial instruments, such as financial products offered by banks (pilot loans, zero-interest loans, agricultural installation loans) but also others;
  • tools for securing farmers’ income and improving their bargaining power: consider extending the Directive on Unfair Trade Practices (UTP) to ban below-cost selling by purchasers, after carefully studying the effects on all food chain operators; provide a new EU policy to enable farmers to collectively negotiate prices and increase the support for cooperatives and producer organisations; protect, enhance and better target direct payments at active farmers in the next CAP; a sustainability contribution for the transition; . ensure carbon-efficient food production systems; ensure equivalence of standards in all trade deals;
• recommends to further promote sector-specific participatory governance and strengthen social dialogue in the agri-food sector;
• points out the need for high-quality agricultural research and investments in education;
• highlights the importance to maintain vibrant agricultural production across Europe and points out that it is important that rural development remains a strong objective in the Common Agricultural Policy and that sufficient funding is allocated to it.