How can the EU Farm to Fork Strategy contribute? Public procurement for sustainable food environments
Public procurement of food is a much-discussed policy instrument - and for good reasons. Public food procurement is a ‘carrot’-type policy tool that allows to use government buying power to promote health, environmental, socio-economic, animal welfare and other food policy objectives. But are we making the best use of this instrument? And how to accelerate the adoption of sustainability-oriented public food procurement policies across Europe?This discussion paper aims to contribute to the European Union (EU) ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy for sustainable food, which should be launched early in the EU’s 2019-2024 legislative cycle.1 The paper discusses the potential of public food procurement to leverage a sustainable food systems transition, and explores how the EU can contribute to advance national and local strategic public food procurement policies. This exploration feeds into the need to find concrete, ambitious and realistic policy pathways to accelerate the move towards a sustainable future, in line with the objectives of the flagship European Green Deal.2 It also aligns with calls to overcome policy silos and advance more coherent forms of policy-making for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and for finding concrete ways of putting the ‘Health in All Policies’ principle into action.
A sustainable food system is key to the well-being of people and planet. There is increasing consensus that Europe’s food system is unsustainable and needs to be transformed in order for it to realise its contribution towards a prosperous future. Public procurement of food is a policy instrument that can contribute to different sustainability objectives, including socio-economic, health, environmental, ethical and quality, at the same time. The first section relates to public procurement as an important transformative potential because it allows connections to be made between food production and settings where food is consumed, and does so through positive incentives (i.e. public money). This creates the opportunity to set standards and utilise buying power in favour of environmental, health and other objectives by rewarding forward-looking economic operators whose activities and business models fit within sustainability premises. At society-wide level, public procurement can help steer markets towards sustainable options and contribute to durable changes in eating habits and preferences. The second section provides a short overview of the existing European regulatory instruments and soft law tools that set the EU legal and intellectual framework for the public procurement of food. Then, six different case studies of transition are briefly described, each showing the steps made towards a more holistic and strategic approach to food procurement. The case studies also highlight some of the barriers faced but also aspirations for the future, cementing the impression of public procurement as a dynamic, innovative and high-potential branch of public policy. The cases were selected taking into account the geographical diversity of EU Member States, and are meant to be illustrative and in no way exhaustive. They are from Gent, Belgium; Copenaghen, Denmark; Finland; Munich, Germany; Latvia; Ljubljana (Slovenia); Valencia, Spain. Final considerations have been done on EU ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy. The strategy should particularly consider ways to: leverage EU funding to support sustainable innovation in national and local public food procurement policies; create an integrated European Sustainable Public Food Procurement Guide; establish an EU network of food procurement professionals; advance the introduction and use of sustainable healthy dietary guidelines; support the elaboration of new sustainability standards; launch a process to further update the Public Procurement Directives.
