Agriculture, CAP and New Emergencies of Food Security

Food security has been, in some way, expressly constitutionalized in Article 39 of the Treaty of Rome, as well as is today in Article 39 TFEU, requiring EU institutions to assure the availability of food supplies by increasing productivity and by ensuring the rational (today: “sustainable”) development of agriculture. This legal basis has long led Europe to play, in the geopolitical arena, a strategical role which seems to have been abdicated in last three decades’ CAP, both for economic and legal reasons. Currently, the new rise of global food emergencies, in a framework of post-pandemic and war upheavals, now calls for a renewed role of Europe which cannot be separated from a complete rethinking of its CAP, recovering the objectives of its origins. But EU has also to cope with some facts: its CAP has undergone a recent reform, to cover the period 2023-2027, with a very little degree of novelty (as regards its general approach), while the recent launch of its climate change strategy (“Green Deal”) is strictly connected to the s.c. “Farm-to-fork Strategy”, implying a constant reduction of environmental impact (and perhaps an extensification of agricultural production). The keywords could be “R&D” and “innovation”, but EU’s legal environment is all but favourable. So what?