New Report Augurs Further Delay of the Promised EU Animal Welfare Revolution

The European Commission’s special advisory group on agriculture has pushed for further delays in the revision of the EU animal welfare laws in their new report, published today, 4 September 2024. This jeopardizes the EU’s ambitions to update the current legislation.

So far, the work of the Strategic Dialogue group on the future of EU Agriculture has pushed back the publication of a draft EU laws on the welfare of farmed animals, originally due in 2023. The group of 29 organizations that worked on the new report, including industry lobbies (e.g. Copa-Cogeca, European Landowners’ Organisation, Euroseeds and EuropaBio) and NGOs (e.g. BirdLife, Eurogroup for Animals and Slow Food), is now asking for more, unnecessary impact assessments and a new timeline for presenting the draft laws – in 2026! This would be a three-year delay so far. The group also calls for new considerations for the impact assessment, risking to further water down the EU ambitions, as spelled out in the EU food strategy (Farm to Fork, published back in 2020).

The recommendations in this report may have a big impact on the strategy of the EU executive arm for the next five years, as the report is expected to shape the new “Vision for Agriculture and Food” that President Ursula von der Leyen will present within the first 100 days of her second term at the helm of the European Commission.

It remains to be seen if the industry representatives would not go back on their word and lobby against the already weak provisions that they agreed to, as happened with the group’s predecessor in Germany. Earlier this year, investigative journalists looked at the effects of the predecessor of this consultative process, which was also chaired by Peter Strohschneider. Lighthouse Reports and the leading German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung revealed how the dominant German farmers’ association DBV broke the promises made in this consensus-based process. As history often repeats itself, farm lobbies may go back on their word during the current EU process as well.

Olga Kikou, Director of Advocacy with The European Institute of Animal Law & Policy and organizer of the ‘End the Cage Age’ European Citizens’ Initiative, said: “This Strategic Dialogue is a classic delay tactic. Over the past many years, there have been many stakeholder discussions and this particular dialogue was not at all needed. Its main purpose was political: to delay the publication of draft laws aiming to reform EU agriculture and appease farmers ahead of elections. We now have a report that, in the case of animal welfare, calls for further delays and even more unnecessary impact assessments. Even if the industry has agreed to the reform in principle, experience shows that they can easily go back on their word and lobby against progress on the issue. We call on President von der Leyen to hold her ground in her upcoming strategy, stick to the legally-binding promises made last term and give farmed animals a life worth living, as the majority of EU citizens expect.”

The Strategic Dialogue on the future of EU Agriculture was first announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at her State of the European Union address on 13 September 2023, with the objective to find common ground for EU agricultural policy. In its 110 pages, the report covers a vision of food production in modern societies, mapping out the context, a vision for the future and provides policy recommendations. It took seven months to complete this report – and those seven months were crucial to stall the new EU animal welfare legislation just before it was meant to be presented. This included a commitment to end caged farming, following the ‘End the Cage Age’ European Citizens’ Initiative, which received 1.4 million verified signatures from across the EU and was the only Initiative after which the European Commission made a clear commitment to implement all its asks. However, the Commission failed to propose a cages ban by 2023 so Olga Kikou and the six other organizers of the Initiative took the Commission to court.