This World Food Day, Europe stands at a crossroads. Our food system – so often romanticised as the backbone of culture, community, and rural life – is today fuelling ecosystem collapse, social injustice, and public health emergencies. Worse still, the future of food and farming is increasingly being shaped by the short-term profits of a few. By shifting to a systems-based approach – one that sees the connections between food, nature, health, and fairness – we can begin to build a future where accessible healthy, sustainable, and abundant food is the norm. A future where farmers thrive, ecosystems recover, animals are treated with dignity, and corporate power is held to account. Now is the time for action. Ben Snelson and Isabel Paliotta report.
Where we are: the European context and what’s holding us back
Europe’s food systems encompass many different sectors, supporting millions of jobs. The problem? They’re also at the heart of multiple, interconnected and snowballing crises. Food in Europe today is defined by corporate exploitation of people, animals and the land and nature on which we depend. To maximise the profits of a few – at the expense of us all.
Europe’s countryside has become dominated by intensive agriculture and scarred by cruel, imposing and mega-polluting animal factories that bear no resemblance to the image we associate with “farms”. This kind of corporate food production is a major driver of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water pollution, poisonous and unbreathable air, and ecosystem collapse. It’s damaging public health and hurting rural communities.
During the last EU mandate (2019-2024), the European Commission announced the “Farm to Fork” (F2F) strategy, an initiative that acknowledged the harm caused by the prevailing agri-food model and aimed to address the many shortcomings of our food system in a coordinated way. The plan was for the EU to deliver measures to cut food-sector emissions and promote healthier, more sustainable diets, while making sure our farmed animals have dignified lives.
Unfortunately, as part of a wider (ongoing) industry-sponsored campaign to shred rules that protect people and planet, the F2F Strategy, among many others, was tossed on the fire before even becoming policy. All to favour unaccountable corporate, profit-driven interests. With these rollbacks being increasingly pushed by emboldened and profit-hungry corporations and their pals in politics, we need a holistic approach to fixing our food systems – now more than ever.
We need to talk about diets…
$12 trillion. That’s how much the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates we are paying for unhealthy and unsustainable food consumption. In its State of Food and Agriculture 2024 report, the FAO shone a light on the costs of global food systems today. Around 70% of that ($8.1 trillion) is linked to unhealthy dietary patterns that drive non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes (in Europe, NCDs are the leading cause of early deaths).
Basically, the real price of food is what you pay at the checkout plus how much of your taxes go to dealing with the impact of that food on our health and the environment.
Meanwhile, big corporations have been busy burying the evidence on the need to shift to healthier, sustainable diets. In 2019, the first EAT-Lancet report issued a stark warning: our overconsumption of animal products is a major driver of GHG emissions, ecosystem degradation, and declining human health. To meaningfully address this urgent challenge, it presented the framework for a “Planetary Health Diet” – a reference diet, grounded in science, to nourish a global population of 10 billion (we’re currently at 8.2) while remaining within Earth’s ecological limits.
The report faced immediate backlash from powerful corporate interests. A coordinated disinformation campaign followed swiftly, involving industry-backed think tanks, “mis-influencers”, and opportunistic fringe health voices. Their goal? To muddy public understanding of healthy diets, discredit science-based guidance and promote meat-heavy narratives – despite the mounting environmental and health costs. This pushback was largely driven by the meat industry, whose lobbying power in Brussels is alive and well.
This October, EAT-Lancet published its second report. EAT-Lancet 2.0 is clear: time is running out. With seven of nine planetary boundaries now breached and our agri-food sector identified as the single largest driver for most of these, the sustainable transition must start now. The impacts are already here.
Meanwhile, disinformation on diets persists in Brussels. Just last week, 355 Members of the European Parliament voted to ban terms like “burger” and “sausage” for plant-based products. Their reason? Such terms confuse consumers. Apparently, these (largely right- and far-right) MEPs believe Europeans can’t tell that oat milk doesn’t come from cows, or that plant-based sausages aren’t made from pigs.
Urgent UN call: time to curtail corporate power in the food system
The sickness in our food systems today is not limited to what we produce, and how we consume. It is also inflicting suffering on millions of people employed within it. Corporate power and human rights in food systems, the UN report published in July 2025, is unambiguous about what is perpetuating this harm – and the needed actions to address it: “Corporate power in food systems is highly concentrated, allowing a relatively small group of people to shape food systems in a way that serves the ultimate goal of profit maximization instead of the public good.” Its calls are plain and urgent: “curtail corporate power; ensure food markets are fair and stable; and hold corporations accountable for human rights violations in food systems.”
Such abuses are a moral stain in food systems the world over, permeating every stretch of the food supply chain. Europe is no exception; an investigation recently revealed systemic labour abuses on farms across the EU. It found that millions of taxpayer euros have been and continue to be paid through the Common Agricultural Policy to farms accused of and even convicted for severe violations of workers’ rights and human rights.
Corporate control of the sector has long forced farmers to produce more for less, leading to spiralling debt among many. One farmer dies by suicide every two days in France, where decreasing wages and no time off are squeezing – and exhausting – smaller businesses. This pressure is reflected across the continent: between 2005 and 2020, 5.3 million smaller farms closed down in Europe.
We know the remedies – it’s time to align around them
The first remedy to these multi-crises has been promoted by many food systems experts for years now: apply a “systems approach”. What is that exactly? In short, as highlighted by a recent and timely FAO report, it’s “a method of solving problems and advancing solutions that considers the interconnections within and between systems to achieve sustained, systemic change at scale”. Concretely: the EU must design policies that address agriculture and food consumption, and that seek to reconcile social, economic, and environmental objectives. Focusing on one issue, objective, or part of the system at a time is exactly how we got into the mess we’re in.
Within that framework, the solutions to Europe’s rotting food system are already known, tested, and ready to scale. Across the continent, communities, farmers, scientists, and civil society are demonstrating what a sustainable food future looks like: resilient short supply chains that prioritise seasonal, regional produce; agroecological and organic farming methods that produce healthy and abundant food while restoring ecosystems; and circular models that recover nutrients, cut waste, and reduce dependencies on polluting synthetic inputs.
Let’s shape this future – together
As we mark World Food Day, we must acknowledge that Europe’s current food and farming system is not just flawed – it’s dangerous. Few big agri-food corporations with excessive power and zero accountability are destroying our ecosystems and their ability to produce food in the long term, wrecking public health, ignoring farmers’ and farm workers’ rights and well-being, and perpetuating widespread cruelty through industrialised animal rearing. At the same time, they are actively blocking policy action that could fix this.
Europe has long demonstrated its strength in crafting complex, collaborative solutions and creating unified standards that hold its Member States together. The EU’s ability to develop, implement and enforce a clear set of rules is what protects not only our health and natural foundations, but our rights and the stability and confidence that ensure businesses can thrive.
Now, it’s time to move beyond endless pilot projects and techno-fixes (which, it’s worth mentioning, are not necessarily sustainable) and instead start legislating for the only viable future for us all – a food system that prioritises the health of people, the planet, and animals, one where each link in the chain supports the others.
The moment for integrated, forward-thinking food policy in Europe is now.
