Strategic Dialogue: Farmers need fair and stable prices, as well as a long-term vision, to meet the challenge of revitalizing their farms.

Today marks the start of Ursula von der Leyen’s strategic dialogue on the future of agriculture. The ECVC is participating and hopes this will be an opportunity to shift the paradigm and work toward food sovereignty. The dialogue must lead to concrete solutions that enable a genuine transformation of food systems.

We are witnessing a massive decline in the number of farms across the EU-27. Between 2005 and 2020, this number fell by approximately 37%[1], particularly among the smallest farms. However, the need to provide citizens with healthy, seasonal food that is financially accessible to everyone—including the poorest segments of the population—can only be met if we have significantly more farms across the entire EU.

Therefore, for the ECVC, the strategic dialogue must address three key levers of action to support existing farmers and help young and new entrants start agricultural businesses:

  • Economic: ensuring farmers have a decent income and, thereby, the ability to plan for their future in the profession. To achieve this, farmers must receive fair prices, and agriculture must be excluded from free trade agreements that are destroying agriculture worldwide.
  • Land use planning: Young people must have access to land. At the EU level, regulations governing land issues must be introduced, in line with the recommendations contained in the INI report on generational renewal and outlined in the ECVC’s draft land directive.
  • Seed rights: The institutions must block the deregulation of GMOs, as provided for in the proposal on new genomic techniques (NGT). The spread of patented and unidentified GMOs in the EU would seriously threaten farmers’ seed rights, endanger the entire GMO-free agricultural sector (especially small agroecological farms), would sacrifice food sovereignty, and would generate enormous profits for the multinational corporations holding patents on these NGTs.


Geneviève Savigny, a farmer and ECVC representative in the Strategic Dialogue, stated: "Thousands of farmers taking to the streets show that the so-called competitive industrial model offers no future for the vast majority of producers, nor for consumers and citizens. The ECVC calls on the institutions to shift the paradigm toward food sovereignty.”

As President of the European Commission, von der Leyen has the opportunity to ensure policy coherence, curb neoliberal doctrine, and prove that she is listening to the discontent of farmers across Europe who are being pushed to their limits. Action is urgently needed.

La Vía Campesina (from Spanish: la vía campesina, lit. “the peasant way”) is an international farmers’ organization founded in 1993 in Mons, Belgium, comprising 182 organizations in 81 countries and describing itself as “an international organization that coordinates peasant organizations representing small and medium-sized producers, agricultural workers, rural women, and indigenous communities from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.”