UK has become food policy “trailblazer” as EU strategy fails to deliver, say campaigners

The European Union must “wake up to the failure of self-regulation” if it is to improve its food environment and protect children from harmful advertising, campaigners have said.

Academics and campaigners lamented the EU’s failure to deliver on the “Farm to Fork” strategy during a session on unhealthy and unjust food systems, held at the European Health Forum Gastein on 27 September.

The strategy, announced in 2020, had promised to “make food systems fair, healthy and environmentally friendly” through moves such as halving pesticide use and adding health and sustainability labels to food packaging.1

Earlier this year the Euronews network revealed that more than half of the promises made through the Farm to Fork strategy had not been delivered.2 However, Anant Jani, research fellow at the Heidelberg Institute for Global Health, Germany, told the conference that the “pioneering policy to revamp the food system” had been “suffocated and taken off the table.”

He said, “We just took it as a given that it would actually …