Published July 28, 2025
By Silvia Pastorelli, EU Petrochemicals Campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, Silke Bollmohr, agrochemical and fossil fuels consultant, and Livia Croset, agrochemical and fossil fuels consultant.
Across Europe, farmers are protesting. A range of factors, including rising costs, low profitability, and unfair trade competition have made life harder for those who feed the continent. The European Commission introduced the Vision for Agriculture and Food in February 2025, a policy intended to address farmers’ concerns and secure the future of European food systems.
But instead of advancing real solutions, the new strategy marks a clear retreat from the more ambitious Farm to Fork Strategy of 2020. Where Farm to Fork sought to transform food production through sustainability and reduced reliance on synthetic inputs, the new Vision prioritizes competition, digitalization, and techno-fixes that reinforce the very fossil-based system it should be moving away from.
Traitement d’azote. Beauce
A Step Backward
Five years ago, the Farm to Fork Strategy aimed to overhaul Europe’s food chain, from soil health to nutrition, with a focus on reducing waste, sustainable livestock farming, and agrochemical use. The strategy had its limitations, but its integrated approach signaled a shift toward a more sustainable and resilient system.
The Farm to Fork Strategy sets input-reduction targets that aim to reduce the use and risk of pesticides and the use of more hazardous pesticides by 50 percent, and aims to reduce the use of fertilizers by at least 20 percent by 2030. Initial developments were promising: between 2020 and 2022, the use of NPK fertilizers in the EU dropped by approximately 13 percent, and while hazardous pesticide use increased slightly, pesticide use and risk have decreased from 77 to 48 HRI 1 (Harmonised Risk Indicator 1), representing about a 38 percent decrease.
The EU Commission has since scrapped the Strategy’s pesticide input targets, and seems to have delayed its Integrated Nutrient Management Action Plan since 2023. Instead, it implicitly addresses input use and nutrient management by promoting digital technologies and data-driven approaches such as precision farming and the Farm Sustainability Tool for Nutrients without attributing input reduction targets.
Precision farming and other approaches, such as carbon farming, are proposed by the Vision as means to increase profitability and income, respectively. Precision farming aims to maximize crop yields and profitability. However, some suggest that carbon farming does little to address the EU’s polluting agricultural sector, and the efficacy of its practices may be overestimated as tools of climate change mitigation. These approaches have been criticized for tethering farmers to an industrial agricultural model and shifting power away from farmers and into agribusiness and the technology industry.
Defossilization vs. Decarbonization: Why It Matters
The difference between decarbonization and defossilization is critical. Decarbonization often focuses on reducing emissions and capturing and storing carbon after the fact. Defossilization means replacing or cutting fossil fuels at the source. The EU Vision centres decarbonization by promoting carbon removal, farming, and storage, as well as associated carbon credits as a means to optimize additional farmer income opportunities.
Focusing on decarbonization over defossilization may eventually make space for false solutions such as blue ammonia. Ammonia is the key ingredient for nitrogen (N) fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, and blue ammonia is where the fossil-based ammonia production process is combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. While branded as a cleaner alternative, blue ammonia entrenches the agricultural sector into fossil dependency and relies on CCS, a technology that has overpromised and underdelivered.
Green ammonia-based fertilizers, also promoted as a low-carbon alternative, fail to address many critical issues of fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture. They change how ammonia is made — by using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels — but they do not change the harm caused by its use and overuse, including nitrous oxide emissions, and its contribution to land and aquatic biodiversity loss. Just under 60 percent of fertilizer-related emissions come from field application. Nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas with a warming potential 273 times that of CO2 for a 100-year timescale — is released as a result of fossil-based applications. Green ammonia is also costly and risks creating neo-colonial practices. In contrast, agroecological approaches can reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizers and restore soil health through natural processes like biological nitrogen fixation.
The Cost of Fossil Dependence
Food systems are deeply entangled with fossil fuels. In 2020, the agri-food sector accounted for 31 percent of total EU emissions, yet it remains one of the few sectors where emissions have not meaningfully declined since 2005.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer alone contributes to over 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Some pesticides are greenhouse gases themselves. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of Sulfuryl fluoride, for instance, is up to 5,000 times greater than CO₂ over a 100-year time horizon.
Beyond climate impacts, agrochemicals can degrade soils, pollute waterways, and harm air quality and biodiversity. They can also expose agricultural workers and communities to serious health risks. And because agrochemicals are directly linked to the availability and price of fossil fuels, the sector is vulnerable to geopolitical shocks, such as those triggered by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
In response, the EU has imposed sanctions and tariffs on Russian imports, pushing to diversify trade and reduce energy dependence. But the REPowerEU Roadmap, while aiming for energy independence from Russia, did not address the EU’s reliance on gas-intensive agricultural inputs with tariffs until this year.
Who Benefits?
The new Vision doesn’t serve farmers: it traps them in a cycle of costly inputs and volatile markets. Failing to confront fossil fuel dependence head-on undermines both environmental and health goals.
Farmers today face rising costs, market instability, and worsening climate conditions that threaten their harvests and, therefore, their income. Yet the Vision offers no real support for transitioning to sustainable practices or reducing dependency on expensive, environmentally harmful inputs. Instead, it rewards speculative decarbonization practices and promotes technologies and data-driven approaches that benefit big agribusinesses, not small farms.
Agroecology, regenerative farming, and localized food systems offer a path forward; one that reduces fossil fuels and emissions, improves soil health, and strengthens food sovereignty. But these approaches require investment, training, and policy frameworks that prioritize people and planet over profit.
A Crossroads for EU Agriculture
As the EU prepares the performance review on the Common Agricultural Policy in 2027, there is still time to course-correct. Real transformation must center input reduction, ecological practices, and outcome-based indicators, not efficiency metrics that prop up an unsustainable status quo.
The current Vision for Agriculture and Food represents a missed opportunity. If the EU wants to meet its climate commitments and restore trust among farmers, it must move beyond techno-fixes and embrace a truly sustainable, equitable, and fossil-free future for food.
