The hunger makers

In this op-ed, Matthias Wolfschmidt of Foodwatch International unpacks the EU’s food system, its reliance on cheap imports, its generation of food waste, the power of lobby groups and Europe’s subsequent reliance on damaging pesticides and fertilizers. In this context, Wolfschmidt considers how the weaponisation of hunger embeds a lock in of problematic agri-industrial inputs, while also pointing to a way out of this bind within 15 years.   […]

There are “strong links between politics and the biggest beneficiaries of the subsidies” in five Central and East European member states of the EU.  That’s according to a new in-depth study “Where does the money go”, which examines the implementation of the EU agriculture funds in Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Czech Republic. The study, which was commissioned by the Greens/EFA political group in the European Parliament, sheds a stark light on how the CAP is not only funding degradation of biodiversity but also degrading democracy. Hans van Scharen reports. […]

A silver lining in the Brexit cloud is that people can radically rethink how food, farming and the rural space operate in the UK. What will this mean for direct payments, for environmental regulations, for food security – and who will do the hard work of farming? Finally, is some of this blue sky thinking of interest to the rest of Europe? […]