A just transition requires a radical change in our food systems

This week, our EU Advocacy Officer Maximilian Herzog was invited to speak at the conference ‘People first: Centring the Just Transition in EU Policy’, hosted in the European Parliament by the Left group. 

In his intervention, he made clear that without a radical change of our food systems, there simply won’t be a successful Green Deal and a truly just transition! 1/3 of all global emissions are attributed to the way that we produce and consume food. Food shapes our culture, our communities, our health, our happiness. And at the same time the reality is that our food system produces injustices at European, local, as well as global level.

That’s why we need to empower people and especially women, young people, and marginalized groups; and also put animal rights at the heart of the transition:

• Be it at food banks all over Europe as people simply cannot afford healthy meals and to go into the supermarket

• Be it in the suburb of The Hague, Moerwijk, where Foodrise EU is assisting a community in their journey towards access to healthy and affordable food

• Be it at the coast of Western Africa and Senegal, where we work with partners and communities that see their basic nutrition, small fish, being depleted for fish meal and fish oil production – which then is used as feed for salmon production in the Global North.

• Be it our partners in the community of Gort, Ireland, that fight against a biogas plant the size of their entire village, without serious offers to make their voices heard.
• Be it the animals that are being used not only to produce meat and dairy in cruel conditions, but should now also produce energy in the form of biogas and biomethane from manure. 

The question must always be: are we only treating the symptoms of injustice, while promoting false solutions? Or are we truly changing the food system, ultimately strengthening the trust in European institutions?

Thank you to Anja Hazekamp, Per Clausen, and Lynn Boylan as well as the staff of the Left group (especially Ciara Barry) who made this conference possible.

Thank you also to our co-panelists Nienke Blauw (a Dutch activist campaigning against PFAS pollution), Dr Aparajita Banerjee  (UCD Just Transition Centre) and Corinna Ziergold (IndustriAll) for your important and inspiring work at European, national, and local level!

Watch the intervention below or find the full recording of the session here.