The Farm to Fork Strategy. A Comprehensive but Cautious Approach to “Multidimensional” Food Sustainability

This paper focuses on the “Farm to Fork Strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system”, adopted by the European Commission in May 2020. Firstly, it provides a conceptual analysis of the objectives of the F2F Strategy: the “multidimensionality” of the macro-objective of food sustainability is underlined. Secondly, the paper examines the regulatory instruments proposed by the European Commission to realize this ambitious agenda: in particular, it underlines the fact that the F2F Strategy adopts a cautious reformist approach based on the cooperation of all the institutional and economic actors involved in the food system. After this descriptive analysis, the paper situates the F2F Strategy in the (recent) history of EU agriculture and food law and frames it as a gradual evolution of the existing legislation through four “new” features: the regained importance of the concept of food security, the enlargement of the concept of food safety, the autonomy of environmental protection in agricultural and food law, and the (only apparent) irrelevance of the economic impact of the transition. The latter point is then critically and specifically analysed: the conclusion is that the F2F Strategy represents a “social regulation” agenda in which the EU tries to realize a multi-layered social objective (food sustainability) through the steering of (common) market. In other words, the underlying “substantive” rationale of the F2F Strategy is the traditional economic growth paradigm, now “greened”. Lastly, three possible flaws of the F2F Strategy’s cautious and reformist approach are discussed: the lack of a strong social justice action, the excessive economic reliance on private capital and the excessive institutional reliance on the implementation actions of Member States.