The Green Deal, with its Farm to Fork Strategy as a key pillar, is a comprehensive and advanced policy agenda for sustainable food systems. The food security crisis arising from the Russian war on Ukraine calls much of this into question, but the concurrent extreme weather events compromising harvests across the globe quickly remind us that we need to face the twin crises of food security and sustainability at the same time.
2023 will be a pivotal year for EU agriculture, with the reformed Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) set to put about €386 billion on the table to make this happen. At PepsiCo, that transformation has already started, and we have ambitious targets to guide us in the coming years. We are embracing regenerative agricultural practices and believe that regenerative agriculture should play a bigger role in EU agricultural policy too.
New green focus
With the new CAP kicking off, now is a good time to look at how this reformed policy with its new green focus could steer the European agri-food sector in the right direction on the ‘Green Deal Highway’.
The new CAP may not be perfect, but this latest reform marks a step-change on sustainability, without sacrificing its primary role of ensuring stability and security for Europe’s farmers, especially salient in the extremely volatile environment as we have today.
Great opportunity to regenerate agriculture
New to the reformed CAP are the ‘eco-schemes’ which will be fully funded by the EU and will be disbursed to farmers who voluntarily adopt specific qualifying green farming practices. EU countries will establish a list of such practices that will be deemed supportive of climate, environmental and animal welfare goals.
This eco-scheme approach is commendable in principle, because it puts the farmer first, does not impose blanket requirements, but offers the necessary flexibility for different situations, yet effectively incentivizes greening. While the jury is still out, eco-schemes have the potential to effect a step-change towards a sustainable food system. But the urgency of the twin challenges of climate change and food security today dictates that we accelerate change. Regenerative agricultural practices offer this opportunity.
Regenerative agriculture consists of a set of techniques that improve and restore ecosystems with a focus on building soil health and fertility, reducing carbon emissions, enhancing watershed management, increasing biodiversity and improving farmer livelihoods – all in line with the CAP eco-scheme goals.
While work on a definition of regenerative agriculture is still underway, it should open up the opportunity to support these practices more intentionally and specifically through the CAP and its considerable funding. This represents an incredible opportunity for the agri-food sector, which already transitions to a sustainable food system, but which still has a long way to go.
From legislation to action, following our targets
At PepsiCo, we know that building a more sustainable agricultural system is both the right thing to do and a necessity to secure our future business growth from the devastating effects of climate change, water scarcity and other environmental risks.
Therefore, we have welcomed the EU Green Deal and we have built on it by launching PepsiCo Positive. Through pep+, we aim to extend regenerative farming practices across 7 million acres globally, of which 2.5 million in Europe. This will eliminate at least 3 million tonnes of GHG emissions by 2030, improve the livelihoods of more than 250,000 people in our agricultural supply chain and help us sustainably source 100% of our key ingredients.
We support thousands of European farmers through PepsiCo’s Sustainable Farming Programme and aim to spread the adoption of regenerative farming across all the land from which we source crops. For instance, we are currently piloting drip irrigation technology in Greece, a high water risk area which directly impacts the yield and quality of potatoes. Over the next 5 years, PepsiCo will scale up the implementation of drip irrigation technology to realize higher water savings, a reduction of fertilizer use, and a decrease of greenhouse gas emissions. Key learnings of the project will be shared with our agricultural partners in order to scale up this technology for a maximum impact.
This pilot, like many others, is funded by PepsiCo and other private partners but for implementation at a large scale, additional public funding, like the CAP, is required to provide farmers the opportunity to invest in regenerative agricultural innovations like this one.
Regenerative agriculture is key to the delivery of the EU Green Deal
There are still several barriers to the development, implementation and scaling up of regenerative agriculture. These include lack of knowledge about what regenerative agriculture is, its implementation and financial limitations.
This is where the new CAP comes into play. The EU food system needs to become more sustainable, and this means having CAP national plans to support those programmes and initiatives to help farmers make this transition. We should not wait for a European consensus on what exactly regenerative agriculture is, but use the CAP flexibility to make a step change now.
In Europe we have both the opportunity and the obligation to transition to sustainable food systems faster. The opportunity, because we have the means, and the CAP is a big part of that. The obligation, because both Europeans and many people outside Europe rely on our production for food security. And if we are not able to halt and reverse environmental depletion, food security will increasingly be compromised. At PepsiCo we believe that regenerative agriculture is a major piece of the puzzle towards a sustainable, resilient food system. We are open for partnerships to drive this exciting agenda.
Opinion by Elise Demaeght, Corporate Affairs Manager, PepsiCo EU
