The European Union Farm to Fork Strategy: Sustainability and Responsible Business in the Food Supply Chain

In May 2020, the European Commission published the Farm to Fork Strategy aiming to create a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system. The Strategy is an important element of the European Green Deal and includes a Draft Action Plan with 27 specific proposals for action and a timeframe. This article outlines the Draft Action Plan and evaluates four clusters of proposed legislative actions. It then analyses how the Strategy will impact food businesses by focusing on two proposals to (a) improve the corporate governance framework, including a requirement for the food industry to integrate sustainability into corporate strategies; and (b) develop an EU code and monitoring framework for responsible business and marketing conduct in the food supply chain. It discusses how to reconcile those proposals with a separate EU commitment to a cross-sectoral legislative initiative on mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence obligations for all EU companies. Overall, we argue, first, that the idea of ‘sustainable business’ conflates many dimensions and should be more clearly explicated and, second, for coherence between the different initiatives targeting the private sector.