What is the Farm to Fork strategy?
The Farm to Fork Strategy is at the heart of the European Green Deal, aiming to make food systems fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly.
It is a direct call to overhaul food systems, to ensure that they are more sustainable and able to withstand global crises. The EU food systems today account for nearly one-third of global GHG emissions, consume large amounts of natural resources, result in biodiversity loss and negative health impacts (due to both under- and over-nutrition) and do not allow fair economic returns and livelihoods for all actors, in particular for primary producers.
How does the Farm to Fork strategy work?
The F2F strategy has six main goals:
- Ensuring sustainable food production
- Ensuring food security
- Stimulating sustainable food processing, wholesale, retail, hospitality, and food services practices
- Promoting sustainable food consumption and facilitating the shift to healthy, sustainable diets
- Reducing food loss and waste
- Combating food fraud along the food supply chain
Is Farm to Fork the key to sustainable supply chains?
There are calls for sustainability plans to be more ambitious, with shorter timescales. There have been concerns about delays in updating the law on the sustainable use of pesticides and nature restoration, with the blame being on the Ukraine crisis, which has affected cereal crops – especially wheat – in Russia and Ukraine, which is an important global producer.
The clear key challenger for EU retailers is there is no defined, concrete version of a sustainable food system. Without a shared understanding of this variable concept, it is difficult to set objectives, a way to measure and track these, and clear concrete commitments needed by all stakeholders.
The EC is in the process of developing a framework legislation on sustainable food systems to support the implementation and aims to propose this framework by the end of 2023.
A platform to start your journey
Here at QADEX we have over 12 years of experience helping food safety teams deliver step change improvements in food safety and brand protection
Deliver gate to plate transparency with our Food Supply Chain Mapping.
Whether for fraud prevention, modern slavery risk management, or supply chain sustainability, you may need to map all or part of your supply chain.