Agriculture

Instead of policy which pulls in different directions, Europe needs an integrated food policy that supports more local attempts at a sustainable and productive food system.

The debate around glyphosate goes beyond whether it’s carcinogenic or not – it challenges our whole model of agriculture, but there is an alternative.

Are the giants of the agro-industry who claim they are determined to “Feed the world” in fact fostering food insecurity through exploitation and environmental degradation?

Food policy isn’t working. Does the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) address the problems, or can agroecology provide the answers?

The biotech industry are lobbying to exclude a new generation of genetic engineering techniques from the European GMO regulations.

Benjamin Joyeux interviews Indian activist Vandana Shiva about biodiversity, seed patents, and the commons.

There is a grave injustice at the heart of the global food system. Climate change has never been more prevalent, yet one of its principal perpetrators – the leading cause of deforestation, water consumption, species extinction, habitat loss, ocean dead zones and pollution, responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions (at least 14.5%) than all transport in the world combined – is being persistently ignored.

Nearly 30,000 people took to the streets of Berlin on January 18, 2014 to protest the industrialisation of farming and the E.U.-U.S Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation. In addition to making their demands heard, the organisers gave a voice and a face to Agrarwende, a citizen movement that is gaining steam in Germany and that calls for a rethinking of agriculture.

Though many of the Commission’s reform proposals have been watered down, the Greens scored some notable successes in ensuring a ‘greening’ of the CAP. What are these, and what do they mean for European farming?

There is potential for organic agriculture in the Western Balkans.