An Agroecology Roadmap ("Reboot")

Communities across Europe are on a roadmap to agroecology and sustainable food systems. At the same time, the quest for ever cheaper goods is compromising the transition. This Roadmap presents a new ambitious plan to reboot the food system, while ensuring the human right to food and the rights of food producers to a fair income. 

The advocacy document calls for systemic changes in agricultural policies that would enable the transition to agroecology. For example, the Roadmap identifies policies that would facilitate the sustainable management of production-based resources. 

The document also underlines the need for substantial investment and for EU support to set up millions of new small and medium-scale agroecological farms. Rather than subsidise harmful industrial agriculture, it suggests shifting them towards agroecological practices. As already done through the EU DEAR Programme, EU funds could continue to help raise awareness of agroecology across different groups of stakeholders, including agriculture researchers, policymakers, consumers and farmers. 

This Roadmap examines the EU's "Farm to Fork Strategy" (2020), and how it has, according to the authors, neither identified the required policy changes, nor developed effective instruments to reach the objective of sustainable food systems. For example, the EU Strategy insufficiently addressed nature protection and fair pricing, they underline. 

Beyond the EU Green Deal, this Roadmap builds on the following international obligations: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Paris Agreement Climate Objectives and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

To learn more about the EU-funded DEAR project, visit the webpage "Rebooting the Food System". The project supports those most affected by industrial agriculture and its harmful consequences, particularly in the Global South. Its vision is a food system that is based on agroecological farming, where food is not only healthy for the people, but also for the planet.