Leaders of the EU's largest farming unions, including the NFU's Peter Kendall, have met in Brussels to lobby the chair of the EU Agriculture Committee and the President of the Agriculture Council over upcoming Common Agricultural Policy reforms.

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The event on Thursday was hosted by Italian farming organisation Coldiretti. Leaders from the French, German and Irish Farming Unions were also present.

NFU president Kendall said that, in order to feed a growing world population, policy going forward should support increases in agricultural production. He said, "From my perspective, I've always felt that this CAP reform has been a missed opportunity. We've got just 37 harvests to increase our food production to the level where it can feed 9 billion people and just 12 harvest before another billion mouths need to be fed.

"We've undertaken countless initiatives to cut red tape and bureaucracy and policy makers have spent the best part of the past 50 years trying to keep the policy as common as possible so that farmers are able to compete fairly on the EU’s single market."  

However, he criticised the upcoming policy reforms for shying away from "a genuine policy framework that embraces and fosters a modern, market orientated, competitive farming sector," in favour of a "complex mish-mash of competing and contradictory policy components which will leave farmers facing more bureaucracy and more distortions in the market."

He and his fellow union leaders said that policy changes ushered in under the reform should ensure that there are no distortions in support between different member states (they oppose proposals to 'modulate' the CAP, allowing national governments to transfer 15 percent of funds between pillars one and two). They also asked that any greening measures be implemented in a way that would not take any productive land out of production.

He added, "We were also united in our calls for strengthening the role of farmers in the supply chain. Producer organisations which offer genuine negotiating powers to farmers will be a part of that, but so too are policies which bring farmers and consumers closer together.

"If there is one lesson we can take from the horsemeat scandal which has rocked the EU meat sector in recent months, it's that consumers demand to know more about their food and want short supply chains. The CAP can and does continue to play a major part in ensuring that consumers continue to get the locally produced, quality product they demand."

However, anti-poverty, sustainable farming and consumer groups have all pushed for policy reform that will address hunger by creating greater equitability, rather than ramping up yields and financially benefitting large landowners. They argue that Kendall and his allies' productionist perspective is outdated and their arguments disingenuous.   

A constellation of conservation, sustainable farming and consumer interest NGOs, who joined together as the No More Blank Cheques Coalition last year called for a radical reform of the subsidy system to ensure that it provides adequate benefit for smaller farmers, the natural environment and serves the interests of European taxpayers who foot the bill for CAP subsidies.

During the earlier stages of the CAP negotiation process, the Coalition warned that "The future of European agriculture is in the hands of a small group of MEPs and Ministers, who are being cajoled by the agro-industry lobby to fork out the bulk of future payments to intensive farmers with little environmental and long-term socio-economic return."

The NGOs declared, "Wider accountability to the EU electorate and to the ultimate common good, our shared environment, must be re-introduced…. We must ensure the long term viability of EU agriculture by making the entire CAP greener and fairer for all farmers."

Making a series of recommendations earlier this week following investigations into post-harvest losses in the country, experts from the German research institutes urged the government to tackle food security and waste issues by improving research funding, encouraging development of local food networks and increasing funding for agricultural development in areas of the world where post-harvest losses are high, usually as a result of poverty and problems with infrastructure, as opposed to increasing agricultural production within Europe.  

In its CAP reform proposals published earlier this year, the European Parliament called for an end to export refunds, which earlier proposals would have maintained. Green Party agriculture spokesperson Bas Eickhout MEP said such "damaging" export refunds "dump EU farm products onto fragile markets in developing countries." He also criticised the decision "not to monitor the effects of the CAP on long term food production capacity in developing countries."