Europe’s agriculture policy seriously damages people’s health

Around 9000 deaths a year result from the European Union’s common agriculture policy (CAP), a new report says.

The study attributes some 7000 deaths from cardiovascular causes and 2000 from stroke to CAP, which has a major influence on nutrition across Europe, including increasing the availability and consumption of products containing saturated fats (Bulletin of the World Health Organization doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.042069).

“CAP reforms are urgently required,” the authors write. “CAP, while established on the basis of sound public health principles, may now have become a hazard to public health throughout the EU and may be promoting inequalities in health through the types of food consumed. This might controversially be described as ‘a system designed to kill Europeans through CHD [coronary heart disease].’”

In the study the authors set out to estimate the burden of cardiovascular disease in 15 European Union countries (before the 2004 enlargement) as a result of excess dietary saturated fats attributable to CAP.

The report says that the original objectives of CAP, whose current annual budget is around €45bn (£34bn; $68bn) or 45% of the overall EU budget, was to ensure an adequate supply of food and to prevent rural poverty.

But, it says, subsidies and direct financial support to farmers who produce milk and beef resulted in surplus unsold food and drink. EU support for the dairy industry alone exceeds €16bn, including €500m a year on domestic consumption aid for butter—a sum equivalent to 1.5 kg per person in the EU.

“The school milk subsidy scheme . . . likewise means that a child drinking full-fat rather than skimmed milk will consume an additional 1.5 kg of saturated fat every year, approximately 4 g per day,” says the report. “UK children obtain 23% of their daily saturated fat intake from full-fat milk.”

It says that the average consumption of saturated fat across the 15 countries is 13.1% of energy consumed, higher than the goal of less than 10%. It points out that dietary changes can result in a reduction in saturated fat consumption in a population. In Finland, saturated fat consumption fell by 5% in 15 years and in Poland by 7%.

“We hypothesised that without CAP subsidies for dairy products . . . per-capita saturated fat consumption would have been 1% lower (2.2 g less), and that monounsaturate and polyunsaturate intake would each have been 0.5% higher (reflecting a compensatory increase in vegetable oils),” the report says.

The authors then calculated the fall in serum cholesterol concentration from such a reduction in fat consumption and estimated the resulting reduction in cardiovascular and stroke mortality. Their results show that the lowering of blood cholesterol by approximately 0.06 mmol/l would have resulted in some 6868 fewer coronary heart disease deaths and 2138 fewer stroke deaths.

“The estimated mortality contribution attributable to CAP was approximately 7000 additional CHD deaths and 2000 additional stroke deaths within the EU, half of them premature,” says the report. “These were very conservative estimates, assuming a 1% reduction in saturated fat energy intake, rather than the 5% and 7% observed in Finland and Poland.”

The authors add: “Our results suggest that changes in CAP subsidies would particularly benefit France, Italy, Spain and the UK.”