Viewpoint: Innovation is key to sustainable agriculture, says MEP

An MEP from the pan-European Volt Europa party is urging the EU to launch a €50 billion moonshot fund to drive breakthrough innovations in food and agriculture.

“We see innovation as one of the crucial elements to move to more sustainable agriculture,” said Anna Strolenberg, who authored Volt’s vision for food in Europe, published on July 7.

That means technological innovations like artificial intelligence; novel foods; and new genomic techniques (NGT), which can improve the nutritional content of plants or make crops more resistant to drought or flooding by altering their DNA. But it also means combining these with nature-based and social innovations.

New technologies like NGT and biopesticides are being held back in Europe due to “slow approval processes and outdated policies,” the Volt report warns. “At the same time, support for nature based and agroecological approaches, or innovations that target consumer behaviour are too limited and scattered to make a real difference.”

The proposed moonshot fund would be a combination of public and private resources, and could leverage Horizon Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), as well as the European Investment Bank’s capacity to crowd in private investors.

While the €50 billion budget proposed is ambitious, it should be remembered that the current Horizon Europe programme already includes almost €9 billion for research and innovation projects on food, bioeconomy, natural resources, agriculture and environment.

Strolenberg sees CAP playing a particularly important role in supporting the uptake of innovative solutions. She suggests money could be freed up by limiting CAP direct payments, which provide income support for farmers. In its Vision for Agriculture and Food, published in February, the Commission suggested future CAP funds would be more targeted while direct payments could be capped.

According to a leaked draft of the Commission’s proposal for the next Framework Programme for research and innovation, the EU could launch a series of “moonshot” projects, in areas from AI and quantum to space. So far, it is unclear how these projects would be governed and there has been no suggestion of a moonshot related to food.

Other proposals from Volt include reforming the European Food Safety Authority to create fast-tracks for products with high potential for health and sustainability and to provide more pre-application guidance for start-ups and scale-ups.

Change on the horizon

Biotech and the bioeconomy are set to have an important place in the European Competitiveness Fund when the Commission presents its proposal for the next long-term EU budget on July 16. But these terms encompass a wide range of technologies, and so far, novel foods do not appear to be a priority, Strolenberg said.

Food security does feature in discussions around strategic autonomy and the need to make Europe less dependent on other parts of the world. However, Strolenberg warns that this cannot simply mean producing more food, as climate change will disrupt food systems while other countries charge ahead with innovations. “If we are serious about food security, we should not just think about how to maintain a status quo, but how to innovate and make this transition,” said the Dutch MEP.

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During the last mandate, the Commission ended up bowing to lobby pressure and shelving most of its farm-to-fork strategy, which had aimed to make food systems fair, healthy and environmentally friendly. Nevertheless, a number of ongoing reforms could boost food and agriculture innovation.

Negotiations between the Parliament and the Council are currently underway over a proposal to relax rules for NGT plants. The reform would exempt NGT plants that could occur naturally or through conventional breeding methods from the strict approval process that is required for genetically modified organisms.

Meanwhile, Strolenberg is co-rapporteur of a European Parliament report calling for a faster registration process for biological control products, which offer alternatives to synthetic pesticides by using, for instance, living micro-organisms or chemical mediators such as pheromones.

It can currently take up to ten years to get such products approved. The report will be put to a vote in plenary later this year, and Strolenberg is confident change will happen. The Commission has already promised to bring forward a proposal by the end of the year to accelerate market access for biopesticides. “You can see the whole Parliament is in favour of speeding up this process,” she said.

Balanced approach

Volt is a pan-European party that currently has five MEPs, who sit with the Greens in the European Parliament. Strolenberg, a member of the Parliament’s agriculture committee, said she developed the report with her team because the future of food was too often neglected in debates on agriculture, and because she noticed her Green colleagues were sometimes more sceptical when it came to promoting innovative techniques.

Strolenberg understands their concerns. For instance, one goal of NGTs should be to make crops more resistant to pests and therefore reduce pesticide use, rather than making them more resistant to pesticides which could have the opposite effect.

Similarly, her vision of the future involves a balance between animal products, cultured meat and plant-based food. The development of meat cultivated from animal cells, while it has a significant environmental upside, has faced pushback from several EU countries including Italy, France and Austria, which fear it threatens traditional agriculture. So far, no cultivated meat product has been approved for sale in the EU.

While there is currently no indication that the Commission would take up Volt’s proposal, there is a growing consensus within the EU that the development and approval of new products and processes is currently too slow. On July 10, the European Parliament adopted a report on the biotech and biomanufacturing sector, which calls for targeted investment in strategic subfields including agri-food biotechnology.

Research and innovation are also at the heart of the Commission’s Vision for Agriculture and Food. While the strategy focuses mostly on production and has far less to say about food and nutrition, Strolenberg believes it is a good start. “There was, I think, an acknowledgment that agriculture has an impact on the climate and that something has to change to work towards a more sustainable agricultural sector,” she said.

The bioeconomy strategy, which the Commission is due to present by the end of the year, will offer another opportunity to take action to support innovation.