Economic and Food Security Impacts of Agricultural Input Reduction Under the European Union Green Deal’s Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies

The European Commission (EC) unveiled its Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies that would impose restrictions on European Union (EU) agriculture through targeted reductions in the use of land, fertilizers, antimicrobials, and pesticides. The proposal also pledges to use EC trade policies and other international efforts to support this vision of sustainable agri-food systems, suggesting intentions to expand the reach of the policy beyond the EU. To examine the economic implications of the proposal, we performed a range of policy simulations on several of the proposed targets using three progressively broader adoption scenarios of the EC’s initiative. Under all these scenarios, we found that the proposed input reductions affect EU farmers by reducing their agricultural production by 7 to 12 percent and diminishing their competitiveness in both domestic and export markets. Moreover, we found that adoption of these strategies would have impacts that stretch beyond the EU, driving up worldwide food prices by 9 (EU only adoption) to 89 percent (global adoption), negatively affecting consumer budgets, and ultimately reducing worldwide societal welfare by $96 billion to $1.1 trillion, depending on how widely other countries adopt the strategies. We estimate that the higher food prices under these scenarios would increase the number of food-insecure people in the world’s most vulnerable regions by 22 million (EU only adoption) to 185 million (global adoption).