The EU’s recently published Green Deal and "Farm to Fork" strategy for farming and food production over the next decade has been criticised for "offshoring" the environmental damage of farming to other countries, while taking the credit for green policies at home.

A new paper published in the highly respected science journal Nature said the EU’s ambitious Green Deal would result in reduced agricultural production in Europe only to increase imports of millions of tonnes of crops and meat, which would create more environmental and climate damage than if they were produced in Europe itself.

“The EU’s Green Deal risks becoming a bad deal for the planet. EU member states are outsourcing environmental damage to other countries, while taking the credit for green policies at home. Although the EU acknowledges that some new legislation will be required around trade, in the short term, nothing will change under the Green Deal,” said the report.

Reduction targets

As part of the Green Deal strategy, the EU is targeting a 50% reduction in pesticide use and a 20% reduction in fertiliser use on European farms by 2030. The EU also wants to see 25% of all farms in Europe farming organically by 2030.

However, the EU is already heavily dependent on agricultural food imports. Only China imports more agricultural product. Crop imports stood at 118m tonnes, while imports of meat and dairy stood at 45m tonnes last year.

The majority of these agri imports are coming from countries with less strict environmental laws than Europe. By reducing agricultural production in Europe under the Green Deal strategy, Europe will inadvertently increase its requirement for imported agricultural produce.

Sustainable intensification

“The EU is falling short in explaining the current trade-offs between imports, domestic production and consumption to its citizens, with no clear strategy to minimize impacts in the future. The EU’s food-production systems are high-tech and efficient. We suggest that, even without genetic modification, soya beans could be grown more productively in Europe using less fertilizer and on less land than elsewhere,” says the report.

“In our view, the EU should embrace ‘sustainable intensification’ practices that use new technologies to boost crop yields. For example, gene-editing techniques (such as CRISPR–Cas) can enhance the edible mass, height and pest resistance of plants without using genes from another species. Unlike the United States and China, the EU is currently treating CRISPR as a conventional GM technology and lags behind them in CRISPR patents for agricultural use, as well as in investments in such research,” said the report.