Tag: sustainability

Over the past quarter of a century, the European Union has transformed itself from a defensive agricultural trade player into the world’s largest agri-food exporter and importer, driven by successive Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms and market-oriented adjustments. This paper traces the evolution of EU agri-trade, highlighting the role of decoupled payments, structural competitiveness, and diversification of trade flows. It assesses the EU’s resilience to recent crises – from COVID-19 to energy shocks and the Ukraine war – while examining growing tensions between trade liberalisation, environmental standards, and geopolitical fragmentation. The analysis stresses the mounting challenges in reconciling climate goals with food security concerns and warns against regressive policy trends that ignore past reform achievements. Ultimately, the paper argues for maintaining evidence-based, market-oriented strategies to preserve the EU’s global leadership in sustainable agri-trade amid rising demands for food sovereignty and strategic autonomy.

This article analyses the evolving role of Brazil in the global agri-food system within the context of rising geopolitical and geoeconomic instability. It explores how Brazil, a leading food producer and exporter, navigates the mounting challenges posed by climate change, shifting trade alliances, protectionist policies, and new sustainability standards, particularly those imposed by key partners. Drawing on statistical data, policy analysis, and a comprehensive literature review, the study develops a critical and exploratory framework to understand the implications of these dynamics for Brazil’s agri-industrial sector. The paper traces Brazil’s agricultural transformation since the 1970s, driven by technology adoption, productivity gains, and export orientation. Brazil has achieved global competitiveness in agricultural products; however, its trade revenues are still highly concentrated on a restricted set of agricultural products and largely dependent on a few large importing countries, especially China. This dependency raises vulnerability amid global trade tensions and demand shifts. Simultaneously, emerging environmental regulations like the EU’s Deforestation Regulation introduce new compliance pressures, prompting the development of compliance and certification mechanisms. Although short-term gains have stemmed from geopolitical shifts such as the US–China trade war, long-term sustainability and market access hinge on Brazil’s ability to meet evolving environmental and governance expectations. This ...

This study explores the link between trade and sustainability, focusing on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures within the WTO framework. It highlights the importance of Specific Trade Concerns (STCs) as a dispute management tool and their implications for sustainability. Analysing three case studies – EU-China (African Swine Fever), EU-India (Methyl Bromide fumigation), and Senegal-EU (mango exports) – the paper identifies divergent, negotiable trade-offs, and cooperative behaviours among trading partners. The study applies the Theory of Change (ToC) framework to the three STCs to assess the effectiveness of linking trade with sustainability goals. Findings reveal that sustainability considerations are critical for resolving STCs and achieving policy coherence and integration. The EU-Senegal case demonstrates ToC alignment, showcasing the success of a cooperative approach in addressing sustainability. In contrast, unsolved issues in the EU-China and EU-India cases highlight faults in sustainability integration. The study underlines STCs’ potential for modernising the WTO by fostering the linkages between trade and sustainability through institutional change.

The way in which food reaches consumers is a high profile component of the food chain’s Greenhouse Gas (GHGs) emissions, but is changing rapidly as technology facilitates online and new targeted logistic solutions which deliver directly to the consumer’s home, workplace or other convenient locations. The challenge is how can new, more fragmented supply chains be developed without increasing GHGs emissions. More broadly speaking, digitalisation is transforming how all food logistics functions. This allows consumers to connect more directly with both farmers and food producers, in Short Food Chains (SFCs), which help the former to understand more about the source of their food and how it was produced. This paper aims to analyse the current SFCs’ challenges, with particular attention paid to fresh products, taking into account the evolution of consumers and market trends as well as the transformation of logistics. The analysis is based on evidence and examples from across Europe. New direct delivery food logistics models could help consumers access supplies of fresh products more easily, improve consumer health and reduce the high waste levels and carbon emissions, which represent key challenges for many European fresh product supply chains. Food suppliers would also benefit by securing more of ...

This paper presents a critical discussion of the concepts of farm-level viability, sustainability and resilience, which are typically discussed separately in the literature. While farm-level viability frequently focuses on measurable economic factors, sustainability is comparatively more elusive because of its added social, cultural and ecological dimensions. Resilience, in turn, is unambiguous in the sense that it requires particular conditions, but is achieved in dynamic ways. A traditional resilience strategy in agriculture globally is co-operative action, involving farmers working together to enhance their viability and sustainability, often achieving resilience. We draw attention to agricultural development models that are distinctive because they leverage co-operative action in and between family farms in agricultural communities while pursuing integrated viability, sustainability and resilience strategies. We focus on the prospect of such rural development models, particularly a values-based supply chain approach, and identify crucial considerations and future research needs.

Societal expectations about agricultural production are changing. There are increased demands on issues such as food safety, animal welfare and the impact of agriculture on the environment (land, water and air). These changes have been refl ected in the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), but information on these issues is lacking and this complicates the required evaluation of policies. The EU Framework 7 project FLINT tries to close this gap by analysing the feasibility of collecting data on these new topics. FLINT has established a data infrastructure with up-to-date farm-level indicators for the monitoring and evaluation of the CAP. The project created a pilot network of more than 1,000 farms to collect a set of sustainability indicators at farm level. The pilot represents farm diversity at EU level, including the different administrative environments in the Member States. This paper sets out the context and the main contributions of the project.

Faced with society’s increasing expectations, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy uses environmental management as an increasingly critical criterion in the allocation of farm subsidies, with a shift in focus from production and area-based subsidies to payments for supplying public goods. There is an increasing demand to assess the ecological and environmental performance of farms as public money spent on provision of environmental services requires justification. The objective of this research is to strengthen the basis of the concept of farm-level environmental performance assessment. Firstly we give an overview of indicator-based sustainability assessment tools. Even though there are several different tools developed globally, and the themes and indicators for the assessment of environmental performance are very similar, there are significant differences in terms of data survey among them. Secondly we describe the development and field testing of the ‘Green-point system’ developed in Hungary. This system is able to measure the environmental performance of farms and their value/ capability of providing public goods and sustaining ecosystem services through a framework of farm enterprise calculations and assessments. The Green-point system fits well into the stream of yet scarce approaches and eff orts, which in several European countries aim to introduce and strengthen ...

One of the most pressing phenomena in recent decades in Europe’s rural areas is population decline. This article summarises how the national sustainable development strategies (NSDS) and the national rural development programmes (NRDP) of the European Union (EU) Member States conceptualise processes of depopulation of rural areas. It gives a systematic overview of the main factors of population decline identified in the strategies and programmes and lists the objectives set and measures proposed by these documents. Although the majority of documents identify the depopulation process and all consider it to be a negative phenomenon, there are no commonly accepted objectives or principles regarding the desired extent of demographic changes in rural areas: the aims vary between ‘reducing’, ‘stopping’, ‘stabilising’ and ‘reversing’ the depopulation of rural areas. Most of the measures proposed against the population declined in NRDPs are linked to Axis 3 of the EU rural development pillar. Regarding sustainability, an upcoming question is the ecological consequences of rural depopulation. The authors suggest that rural policies need a stronger theoretical basis to respond this question and that future national sustainable development strategies should pay more attention to the problem.