The Food Policy of the European Union

Food policy is mostly linked to the ‘production and allocation of food’. However, food policy incorporates various dimensions, such as food safety and health, obesity, distribution, transportation, allocation, consumption, culture and traditions, design and promotion and many more. It also involves various institutions and actors and follows specific decision-making processes and rules within the EU multilevel governance.
Food policy has been treated as a sub-compartment of agricultural policy (Daugbjerg and Swinbank, 2012). This article argues that despite the strong link between food policy and agriculture but also to policies on environment, energy, climate, the EU food policy has become a self-standing policy with its own actors, institutions, decision-making processes and policy instruments. The emergence of EU food policy responded to a series of events/crises in the 1990s that acted as drivers for policy change and triggered new ideas, norms and beliefs around food safety and health standards, food production and the environment. These developments enabled a new policy discourse that signifies the cognitive dimensions of a policy paradigm shift. They also created a critical juncture that led to a significant transfer of regulatory competences from the member states to EU, over time, particularly in relation to safety, labelling and consumer information, but also use of biotechnology, fraud, storage and transportation that mark the institutionalization of EU food policy.