Call for Better Food

A coalition of European organizations concerned with the future of food and agriculture has created a declaration as the first step in efforts to build a broad movement of change towards food sovereignty. The European Food Declaration outlines the group’s recommended policy objectives for the next several decades of the Common Agriculture and Food policy (CAP), the European Union’s system of agricultural subsidies and programs.

“After more than a half-century of industrialization of agriculture and food production, sustainable family farming and local food cultures have been substantially reduced in Europe,” the declaration states. “Today, our food system is dependent on under-priced fossil fuels, does not recognize the limitations of water and land resources, and supports unhealthy diets high in calories, fat and salt, and low in fruit, vegetables and grains. Looking ahead, rising energy costs, drastic losses in biodiversity, climate change and declining water and land resources threaten the future of food production. At the same time, a growing world population faces the potential dual burden of widespread hunger and chronic diseases due to overconsumption”.

The coalition of organizations, which includes Slow Food, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, recognizes the increase in grassroots activities and local movements recently, but urges that it is also necessary to build a broad coalition of groups at the European level to challenge the current CAP and the avowed plans for a renewed CAP, which is currently being debated and is due for change in 2013.

The declaration calls for a healthy, sustainable, fair and mutually supportive CAP, and includes twelve key principles including encouraging the production and consumption of local, seasonal, high quality products, reconnecting citizens with their food and food producers, and considers food as a universal human right, not merely a commodity.

The European Food Declaration is currently collecting signatures from organizations, groups and individuals, aiming to create a unified force in order to reach their common objectives of building a better food system.

Click here for more information or to sign the declaration

Simone Gie
[email protected]