 Good production system. And the first presentation is from. I hope I pronounce your name correctly geese skill toys. Who is the head of unit for policy perspectives in the director general for agriculture and rural development of the European Commission. As you all know, a large part of the budget of the European Union is dedicated to food production systems. And the European Commission has a very important role in setting policies and priorities that deeply affect the way food is produced. We'll hear from geese skill toys who will talk about sustainable food systems, the European Union experience. Thanks a lot for accepting our invitation and the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me well. Yeah, I will try to share my screen. Very good. Can you see the slides. Yes, perfect. Excellent. Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure for me to to have the opportunity to speak to you when and talk about sustainable food systems. Quite a switch from the very interesting scientific presentations that I was able to listen to before before your coffee break. And it's especially a pity I can't be there because I visited yes on several occasions and and really loved the city so it's a great pity that I have to do this from Brussels but that's that's the reality. What I would like to do with you is is in fact talk a little bit about the Green Deal which is in a way our main policy agenda, focusing on on transforming European economy in a sustainable way and then talk about what I would call three experiences or three aspects of this in in relation to food and in that context I will say a little bit about agricultural policy because as you already kindly did. I work in agricultural policy in Brussels so I have a bit more hands on knowledge about that aspect of the food system but but but I should like to underline right from the start already that when talking about a food system we really mean the food system all the way to the consumer and and beyond the whole circular food system. So I want to start with a with a picture of the boss, so to say Mrs. van der Leyen but but also because I think that she she made some very interesting choices and remarks already in December 2019 when the European Commission adopted the Green Deal, really putting the net zero ambition in 2050 as the overall ambition of this of this college with the Green Deal as the top priority, rather a different than previous European Commission so the, the whole issue of sustainability has changed also now biodiversity of course is really central to the work of this of this Commission and I think it's also important that in this quote that you see that talks about an ecological transition so really it's not a technological fix, but it's really a transition of our of the way we work, and she called it Europe's man on the moon moment in one of her speeches in 2019 and, and I think with that she refers to the importance of innovation of knowledge and also of technology in in this strategy and that's why I think it's very interesting that you are organizing this this particular session also with a strong focus on knowledge and science in in the in the challenge of finding sustainable societies. The Green Deal, there's a lot going on. I'm not a specialist in everything I will focus on what we call the farm to fork strategy which is really the, the food aspect of this, but the strategy is much wider you may recall, only two weeks ago the Green Deal was published what we call a Green Deal industrial plan for the net zero age, which is all about clean technologies and making sure those technologies are developing and staying in Europe. I think also what is important is, is to underline that you can see from all these initiatives that are part of the Green Deal that it's really about a growth strategy it's not about more regulation. Although, of course regulation plays a role, but it's really about growth and I think. The social sector would call this economic progress it's not growth, just growth, it's really trying to create a better economic outcome. Food is central to all of this food is central to all of this why because it's an enormously important part of our economy. If you, if you look at food agriculture, the food industry but also the whole restaurant you know, it's, it's the biggest sector of the European European economy with incredible challenges. First of all, there is the, the need to reduce the environmental and climate footprint of the food system. There are different issues like food waste. You can think of the, the issues of, of water pollution of air pollution. We've seen a number of slides demonstrating the damage can be done by intensive agricultural systems or non optimal agricultural systems to to our natural environment. The aspect of the food system that is it's very global. And that's also why the ambition that we have is not only to change the European food system, but really to reach out and we do this through bilateral contacts in our free trade as agreements that we are with a number of countries around the world. Sustainable food systems is an integral part, but also multilaterally. For example, the United Nations organized a sustainable food system summit in September 2021 and there's now a, a follow up to that and a number of coalitions so multilateral coalitions private sectors universities, states, countries, or working together on different topics from agro ecology to sustainable productivity growth, and many things in between. So, I think this global transition, where we try to lead and not try to impose is extremely, extremely important because as your presentations earlier have shown, this is really a global, a global challenge. It's an easy one so have to go step step by step. I think that the third point on this on this slide gives gives is links as to this economic growth aspect already. There's a lot about rewarding farmers for storing carbon had a whole carbon economy I think that's an opportunity for the food system. There's also a lot of opportunity in the bio economy. When we think about transitioning the economy to net zero in 2050. There's a lot of raw material biomass we need intelligence, a natural solutions to replace a lot of the chemical products that that we use so there's a tremendous opportunity for for for agricultural companies and for food processing companies to come with solutions that are part of a sustainable food system so of course then we move a bit beyond food but I think it's very important to highlight. And also within food itself there are opportunities. One of the targets of our food strategy in Europe is to grow more organic, not all of it organic, but we see a bigger place for organic farming why not only because it's good for biodiversity and it has other sustainability advantages but also because there is a market for this market that is I do recognize that challenge by the high food prices linked to the food inflation situation in which we find ourselves but even with this food inflation we still see a quite considerable amount. Maybe the last point on this is the issue of resilience and I think that that really is extremely important in our farm to fork strategy. This strategy came out in in May of 2020. So that was when we were in full lockdown. We're all working from home, and we were realizing how important a functioning food system is I think many of us for the first time were queuing at a shop to be able to go in to be able to buy food and our delivery and logistical systems were were under pressure. And I think the European food system got through this quite quite quite nicely and thanks also to to the hard work of many people in food industry, farming in retail and so on and so forth. Also thanks to to various officials in government agencies that were able to facilitate cross border trade, but it did focus a lot on this aspect of resilience how do you make sure that a food system is still in the storm. And now with the war in Ukraine, and with the pressure from from climate change which we felt last year with the drought and now also northern Italy of course but also France already facing an enormous rain deficit. We realize that this issue of resilience is much broader and really be a central feature of how we design a sustainable food system in the future. We want to dwell too long on the targets we set but you have to realize that when we started with this green deal and with this farm to fork strategy we said okay let's focus on a number of key objectives we want to reach and let's quantify them. What we say aspirational targets, they are targets that we've set because that focuses the minds and so a target on reduction of use of pesticides a target to increase the area farm organically reduction of antibiotics hugely important for the one health component of our green deal. Nutrient losses are already referred to that that reducing nutrient losses is critically important not reducing fertilizer gifts, plants need to eat but reducing the losses being much more efficient. Also, improving and increasing the number of landscape features as a proxy for for biodiversity and of course, in the digital age we need to make sure that the countryside is well connected to broadband so all these targets are to in a way focus our minds and focus focus the actions of public policymakers but also a private companies. I said I was going to talk about the EU experience, so I wanted to talk about three experiences and one one is actually to to underline that all this is this is this is new this green deal this is a new policy priority, but it didn't start in 2019 that this these graphs show changes in certain emissions over the past past two three decades, where you see in blue that the EU actually has been able for agriculture not the food system but for agriculture to reduce emissions in other parts of the world. This has gone up. Obviously, and I see that there's many scientists in the room you know you can play tricks with percentages so you know that percentages don't say everything, but I think what is important to realize is that many efforts have been made by by farmers by food companies in the EU to already address the sustainability challenge so we're on a path. And I think that's that's very important because one of the challenges of the Green Deal is not to set the targets is not to come up with the great hands, but it actually to implement them and to to bring everybody along we have nine million farmers in Europe, we would all like for all these farmers to produce more efficiently to produce with fewer emissions to produce sustainably. So we need to get them along we need them in fact to to believe that making those investments making those steps changing their practices is the right way forward. And that is why we have become an agricultural policy you chair you already referred to the significant budgetary allocations that go into that policy which is very important and now with a reform that we concluded in 2021, a larger much larger share of that money is actually going into practices financing practices for sustainable farming. So that that is that is key. I think another part of the. Let's see how there we go. Another part of the of the of the, the ongoing change is to look at demand and I and I picked up a slide here from our outlook report for 2032, which the European Commission, published in December, based on a modeling work on economic modeling work where we, where we show what we expect in terms of demand for, and in this case, meet livestock where we see a slight decline happening. So in the big discussion about livestock and meat consumption livestock being often in the place of criticism, even though we strongly believe that livestock has a place in agriculture has an important place in agriculture but needs to be sustainable needs to be part of a circle or agricultural system. We see that that that consumers already changing their behavior changing their behavior slightly, but we expect this to to continue and to to to slow down which also means for farming that adjustments are necessary, because in our economy, you have to listen to people understand demand where is demand going, what changes are happening and adjust your production system so having these long term perspectives in mind is extremely important. And talking about emission reductions that have happened talking about demand that is changing I think it's also important to underline that not everything is, what did I say in English hunky dory everything's fine. This is an important measure of of biodiversity trends which are not going very well, particularly here on farmland birds. So, we also have the message to agriculture to farmers that much more needs to be done so this first experience of the EU is yes. This has already happened I think the EU farming system is already performing extremely well at a global level in terms of sustainability but not enough. Not enough, but things are changing farmers are changing consumers are changing. The second experience. It's the the experience of implementation and this is a slide which has too many words, but all the, all the different bullet points relate to different legislative and non legislative initiatives that the European Commission is taking to change laws to change policies to help with this transition to a sustainable food system. In relation to sustainable food production. I already talked about the common agricultural policy we have an action plan for organic farming. You may have heard about the fact that we have proposed legislation on the sustainable use of pesticides, which has run into some discussion and opposition in the legislative branches here in Brussels. For example, nutrient management plans, also proposal on new genomic techniques to facilitate their use in the EU. We are also talking about promoting shifts toward more healthy diets, food labeling, for example, but also promotion program for agricultural products, and then focusing on sustainability we're reviewing our school and you helped finance school milk and fruit. Very important to also make sure that that is in line with our sustainability objectives and then of course, we are working also to ensure the sustainable sustainability is, you know, in the focus of food industry retail hospitality sector. The range of actions also for that part of the of the food chain. And we're working on overarching legislation, what we call a legislative framework for sustainable food systems. So there was a lot of legislative initiatives that sort of help frame this transition. In this list of initiatives, there is not even our very considerable research investment, for example, research investments and everything that has to do with with with food, food systems climate environment. Our horizon program, our soil mission I found the presentation of the American professor on on soil and regenerative agriculture very interesting and I think this is really also reflected in our in our research work on on soil. Many initiatives, but not always and that's why I called it an EU experience not always easy in in sometimes they say that making laws or making policies is like making sausages I don't know if that's a very appropriate. Link or an appropriate image but but it gives you some somewhat the idea that, you know, turning a green deal ambition into reality, you know is hard work, and also involves compromises but I think overall on the right track we are delivering and I think also as I said in my previous slides the consumers the farmers are also also delivering moving moving in the direction of sustainability. And then the last experience and this is the last point I will make it and I'm happy to take a few questions the last experience I want to underline is the experience of food security and resilience I already talked a little bit about resilience when I when I spoke about the, the impact of this farm to fork strategy in the midst of the covert lockdowns. And now we, we notice of course the importance of resilience in relation to climate changes, which is what this map shows the assessment of the potential changes in different parts of Europe in to climate change. But of course, what is also extremely important to mention in this context is the war in Ukraine, which has brought food security, really high on the agenda, food security, which has always been there, the European treaty, the Treaty of Rome, which contains a number of articles on agriculture policy that really have food security at their heart and these these articles from the Treaty of Rome have never been changed. They are still what we use to design our policies but of course, the world has become in a way more complex there are more things taken to be taken into account. The issue of food security is really driving also the the agenda and is driving also some of the tensions in the debate about sustainability. For example, there will be some who would argue that we need to produce a lot of food now, but this shouldn't go we would answer to the detriment of of our sustainability agenda, because we realize that this sustainability agenda is essential to be able to ensure food security in the long run. And in fact the European Commission did an analysis of this, this which was published in in January, drivers of food security, where we identified a lot of these, a lot of these drivers and these tensions, and what we are making is really trying to combine, combine the two to invest in more sustainable farming systems while at the same time, ensuring that food is that today and food is there also at a reasonable price with food inflation on average of 18% in the EU in December. We're really looking at a rate of food inflation that is very difficult for many poorer households in the EU. So, so this this dimension of food security not only availability but also affordability and and access in the long run, and the resilience of the food system are really aspects that that needs and must be integrated in in our work to develop sustainable food systems. So I hope with this short presentation, much less scientific than the previous ones I've been able to give you a bit of insight into the work we're doing on on on on on making making our food system or sustainable from the side of Brussels and I'd be happy to to take further questions. Thank you. Thanks a lot for your very comprehensive presentation. I'll start with the question myself. You showed us that globally Europe is doing much better than other large geographic areas in terms of the environmental impact of its agricultural system with a net decrease in emissions, for example. But that's measured on the total surface area that we use for agriculture and it doesn't tell us what the impact is on a per unit product basis. And one of the concerns is that we may decrease the impact on a per unit surface basis, but we may not produce enough. And so the net result of that will be that we'll have to import what we no longer produce ourselves from other countries that have a greater environmental impact and I remember hearing one of your colleagues in the commission that was saying that in order to make the farm to fork strategy. More effective. There was a thinking. So the commission was thinking about putting regulations on the food imports from other parts of the world. So that only food that is produced in a sustainable manner could be imported. Is that still on the agenda is that a concern or not. Very good. This is a good question. There's a lot to answer. So first on on the per unit emissions. So the fear would be that we would import products that would have a higher emission per unit from other countries. I always say that we have to we have to measure and know because it's not always a better in Europe. So let's let's take this from an international perspective. I think that that needs to be recognized. But for example on climate emissions we have been improving our per product emissions considerably. We've also been improving our trade balance. So we are exporting more. So so far the fear that we would be reducing production in Europe and importing more doesn't seem to hold true. In fact, if you look at the EU food imports. We're importing tropical products logically. And a considerable quantity of animal feed mainly so yeah and maze. So that that would be our weakness and another weakness would be the import of fertilizer and energy and that those are the weaknesses we identified in the context of the Ukraine crisis. So then to your last question, what is the are we going to impose regulation to avoid imports that are less sustainable while we're part of the WTO. The World Trade Organization provides us with a with a regulatory context which we will respect, which means that you cannot impose. And just like that requirements on on production methods, for example, and often an example that is used is for animal welfare, for example, but you can imagine all kinds of other things. There are a few areas where where the Commission is is thinking to to restrain imports, which is, for example, in the area of antibiotics, restrain imports is not the right word where we where we would apply rules that are already valid in the other imports, for example, because the in the area of antibiotics what we are fighting is the, the resistance to bacteria we don't want the antibiotics become less effective. And this is a global challenge. This is a global challenge where we believe that that it merits to be addressed also at a global level. Yeah, so that is a sort of reasoning we are we are developing on this on this area, but it's not the case that we are developing a blanket legislation to to block imports on the country in fact, in fact, by by we need trade that we don't believe that we don't believe in in in in restricting trade also because from the perspective of food security this would be unwise. It has been shown time and again that that if we restrict trade too much this is in the end to the detriment of food security. We need to work with partners globally to improve sustainability rather than to work only with restrictions. I hope this answers your question but we can discuss. I think you can organize a conference about this. Thanks a lot it was the answer was very complete thanks. Are there other questions from the floor or online. The question is the following. I mean I presume that the way organization measure the level of sustainability of some action in the food or in other issues is different from country to countries actually is different maybe from city to city. There is any effort or anything that you are you is doing to give a sort of to try a sort of unification or harmonization of what it should be the level of of measuring the degree of sustainability of the action. Thank you. That's very important and interesting. I think you can you can measure a different level so for the strategy as a whole. We are developing the measuring a methodology for our key targets. We are using a number of known indicators but for some areas we're also trying to develop new indicators particularly in the area of biodiversity which is very difficult to to measure specifically at a more aggregate scale. We are working on much more specific measurement and I'm thinking now. For example about carbon farming where we have proposed legislation that is in fact about how to measure carbon what are the methodology so that private investors who want to measure carbon is stored by farming activities that they know that what they're paying for is really happening and that we also as public policymakers know what's happening and this legislation is currently being being discussed and I think it's key and this is in fact this is the accounting system for carbon carbon farming that we are we are talking about so there we also have. We are trying really to to harmonize methodologies and other area of harmonization is related to labeling so one of the initiatives that we are trying to develop is a sustainability label there's a lot of labeling and obviously labeling. The big goal of labeling is that you try to learn consumers into buying more sustainable products but also companies to produce more of those sustainable products and and you need for label to be used on the internal market you need to harmonize methodology. And that is what we are also working at there are different initiatives in that regard and it's it's not so easy particularly also again in the area of biodiversity. For example, an organic farm can score well on on biodiversity can score well on a number of other indicators but maybe not on on on climate emissions because there's a lower yield so per product you will have maybe more emissions. So how to balance those different aspects of of environmental sustainability is is complicated so work is being is ongoing to try to find a good measure for for that and that would then apply for the whole EU market. I hope this. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for your very useful intervention and I think we need to move on to avoid further delays. Thank you again for accepting our invitation. And before we move to the next speaker I just want to remind the participants.