Policy is not only important for producers, it's important also for the environment and
it's also important for the last part of the food production which is the consumers.
And what we are trying to do, looking into the future of agriculture, is to try to address
all the multiple challenges that they face in a policy that compliments with it's measures.
That is the manner by which we address this challenges.
European famers are very mass committed to the sustainable policies when it comes to
european agriculture policy and producing food and environmental services, societal
services to communities.
It's very much about how to make that work at the marketplace.
And when we talk about food, it's really about how to make the food, the agrifood chain deliver
better results for farmers, to sustain their livelihoods which is now increasingly we need
to have investment, we need to have new technologies employed to the agriculture sector.
And that requires good income from the market.
[Farmers] should take a central place because they are the ones that feed us.
But today they are being sidelined and used as the adjustment variable for the prices
paid by consumers, so we have to rebalance this food chain using a certain number of
mechanisms that I proposed in the food price volatility report that was adopted by the
European Parliament at the end of the year.
The problem with food, maybe here in Brussels it's not really a concern, it's more on the
ground in your everyday life.
Here it's about politics, so for me it's quite a challenge to be able to bring reality to
politics and to make it much better so that really the policies that we are going to design
for conference are really meant to be able to provide good food for all consumers in
Europe.
Whether you are in the city or for canteens or for public gathering, or even for precarious
people, so that they also need to have access to good food and for all these you need some
policy.
And if the capital alone is not able to address this, you need to have a kind of food policy,
overarching food policy, that would address different aspects so that you have good production,
but also a question of policy for territorial approach and for food approach, for everybody.
I believe that there is an emerging trend that is getting increasingly bigger in the,
among our european consumers, to get food products that are not only of really good
quality, but also certified products that they can trust, whose origins can be understood
and that come with all the expected nutritional qualities.
Because I think consumers are getting more and more concerned about the way which food
products are being produced and that they also seem to take an increasing interest in
the environmental impact, for example, also the way the products are packaged or not.
Today, in the highly competitive retail markets, and saturated markets, what we see is that
the products that where highest growth are in the premium segments and these will be
organic products, local products or products that meet a certain specifications, such as
animal welfare standards or well or fair trade standards.
And these products interestingly are those who generate the highest growth potentials
and they don't need the usual promotional support that is developed for branded goods.