De kwetsbaarheid van het Europese landbouw- en voedselsysteem ...

Food security in Europe
Since the food crisis of 2007/2008, global food security has once again risen to the top of public
and political agendas, also in the Netherlands. However, the vulnerability of European
agriculture and food security has remained underexposed. In recent years, the Dutch Platform
for Agriculture, Innovation and Society has explored the vulnerability of the European agriculture
and food system to physical calamities and geopolitics. We focused on calamities
(such as a prolonged drought) that can affect food security, not on calamities that primarily
affect food safety (such as a nuclear disaster). The time horizon of our study was 2020.
Research questions
The Platform addressed the following questions:
• To what extent will the EU remain self-sufficient in food in the mid term (10 years), assuming
a scenario of continuing liberalisation?
• Which relevant physical calamities and geopolitical trend reversals could take place until
2020, both in the EU and elsewhere?
• What would be the consequences of these calamities and reversals for agriculture and the
food system in the EU?
• To what extent can the market, with its self-regulating capacity, solve the problems itself?
Where will market failures be expected and where will government interventions be required?
• Assuming that the EU market will respond to scarcity by exporting less grain and importing
more, and the EU will possibly stimulate this response as well, what would be the
consequences for developing countries?
• Which preventive and reactive options does the EU have to reduce the risks for itself and
for developing countries?
Conclusions
These questions have been partly answered by desk studies, workshops and several research
projects conducted by Wageningen UR, which developed an indicative computational model
for this purpose.
In very general terms, the conclusions can be summarised as follows:
• The European food system has two Achilles heels: its dependency on imports of soya and
soybean meal and its vulnerability for contagious animal diseases. The system is also vulnerable
to crop failures of feed crops and grass. This makes livestock farming and the meat
and dairy chains the most vulnerable sectors.
• The biggest risks for animal feed security appear to be prolonged drought and a serious
volcanic eruption.
• The biggest risk for soya imports appears to be geopolitics.
• The biggest risk in terms of animal health appears to be contagious diseases for which no
vaccine exists and which can be spread on a large scale (possibly through bioterrorism).
• The market has a large self-regulating capacity, but can seriously fail, especially in agriculture
and in case of calamities. The Common Agricultural Policy of the EU does not take
sufficient account of this situation.
• The European market will respond to possible animal scarcity by exporting less grain and
importing more. This response can be amplified by policy measures. However, that can
drive up the grain price on the world market, which may imply major risks for foodimporting
developing countries.
• The EU and the Netherlands have many policy options to reduce the probability of calamities
and to build buffers ("shock breakers") into the system.
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