Abstract
The third conference will focus on the campaign for a “Common Food Policy” between 2016 and 2019, leading up to the release of a report under that title by IPES-Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, a few months before the May 2019 European elections.
Over the course of three years, a series of consultations took place, both within European institutions and in various European cities, to lay the groundwork for sustainable food systems in the EU and to call for policies affecting the food environment (agricultural policy, environmental policy, health policy, employment policy, trade policy, among others) be better aligned with one another, in order both to avoid contradictions among them and to identify previously unrecognized synergies. The proposal for a “Common Food Policy” for the EU represents an unprecedented example of a new issue being placed on the European agenda by civil society and social movements from diverse backgrounds and with varying concerns, yet all converging on the goal of strengthening the sustainability of European policies affecting agriculture and food. It also illustrates how the adoption of a multi-year “strategy”—which enables the coordination of several sectoral policies and the alignment of multiple levels of governance, from the municipal and regional levels through the Member State level to the European level—makes it possible to overcome the inertia of legacy systems, as identified by the previous conference.
