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

• regarding preparedness (response capacity): the reduction of stockpiles and mandatory
land set-aside. Moreover, private companies are also maintaining lower inventories due
to their just-in-time delivery;
• regarding response: the absence of European disaster planning for scarcities of feed and
food.
The EU is inadequately prepared for calamities. More preventive policy and more response
capacity are both required.
Preventive policy
Prevention against crop failures caused by drought or a volcanic eruption is virtually impossible.
The best prevention against soya scarcity is for the EU to start growing more proteinrich
animal feed. This can take place through three types of measures:
• promoting the production of protein crops through innovation, subsidies and, if necessary,
an import duty. The latter is possible only if trading partners are compensated, for
example by offering additional market access for meat, dairy products or sorghum;
• promoting the production of energy crops that can provide protein suitable for animal
feed as a by-product. This is already taking place due to the biofuel blending obligation
(mandating a biofuel percentage rising to 10% in 2020) and can be strengthened by requiring
a substantial proportion of the biofuels to be produced in the EU. However, research
is required to study the sustainability of this option;
• selective relaxation of the ban on the use of meat and bone meal in animal feed. This
ban was implemented in 2000 due to the BSE crisis. The European Commission wants
to allow meat and bone meal from poultry to be used in pig feed and the reverse. As a
rough estimate, this could replace 4-11% of soya imports.
Prevention of large-scale epidemics of animal diseases is possible by implementing security
policy against bioterrorism, by limiting long-distance transport of livestock and by mandating
minimum distances between livestock farms. Through such preventive measures and
buffers, the EU can reduce the severity of price fluctuations affecting animal feed, meat and
dairy products, limit the damage to the livestock, meat and dairy sectors, limit the incentives
for criminality and speculation and minimise the risk of malnutrition among vulnerable
groups.
Response capacity
Response capacity primarily requires buffers. Obviously, there are already buffers on the
demand side, such as wasting less food and eating less meat. There are also buffers on the
supply side, such as using grass from roadside verges and nature reserves, exporting less
grain and importing more grain. It is possible to strengthen the latter response, but as stated
previously this is potentially harmful for food-importing developing countries.
Another potential buffer is for the EU to suspend import duties on meat and dairy products
or to expand the import quota. This would not only limit price increases for European consumers,
but also for livestock farmers, which would hamper recovery. Moreover, in the international
arena such a measure is not easy to roll back. As a result, the EU could risk
merely exchanging its structural dependency on feed imports for dependency on imports of
meat and dairy products. This measure should therefore be applied cautiously. Limiting both
dependencies appears to be a better option.
Until recently, the EU also maintained two other buffers: 1) large stockpiles of grains, milk
powder and meat, and 2) an area of mandatory set-aside land. But these buffers have largely
been eliminated as part of the liberalisation of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The EU
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