The European Commision will not conduct an impact assessment, deputy director general for health and food safety Claire Bury has said.

“We’re not going to assess the strategy as a whole, I don’t think that makes much sense,” Bury told a ‘Food & Farming: What future for Europe?’ webinar on Wednesday.

“There will be impact assessments on anything that we put into law, and anything that becomes a legal obligation.”

Bury also told the webinar that here are no sector's that are “not sustainable” per se, there are only business practices that are not unsustainable and that the commission should work with the livestock sector.

Ideology influence

Italian MEP Herbert Dorfmann told the webinar that he does not think the Farm to Fork strategy was written based only on science but for some part on ideology.

“Another issue where I see a lot of ideology is the connection between livestock and climate. It is way too simplistic to say that ‘1kg of meat equal X kilos of CO2’. It simply hides the academic debate and the real role and contribution of livestock,“ Dorfmann said.

“We need the animals, because I do not think that we, the citizens should start to eat grass.

“If we do not have animals which can use this permanent grassland, then the only possibility is to transform this into arable land. This would be the real disaster for the climate.”