EU farming support contributing to pricier healthy food, says UN

This amounts to “indirect taxation,” said David Laborde, one of the authors behind the report and the FAO’s lead director of agrifood economics.

The EU’s direct farm subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy, which Europe has paid since the 1960s, is partly to blame. Europe’s agricultural subsidies (CAP) form one of the largest EU funding programs.

But, the lack of investment into research to bring down the costs of producing fruit and vegetables, which tend to be labor-intensive, has had an even bigger effect on the affordability of healthy foods in Europe, Laborde said.

“This has increased productivity in some sectors. But we have done nothing for pulses and beans,” Laborde told POLITICO. 

For the average European citizen, that means that the cost of buying a meal every day that meets the minimum requirements for a healthy diet — the right balance of nutrients, calories and variation — rose by $1 between 2021 and 2025, to $3.97. The European price surge is higher than the world average of a 25 percent increase, the FAO report found.

For every healthy meal, vegetables, fruit and legumes eat up nearly 60 percent of the total price, while starchy crops like wheat or rice take up just 13 percent. Still, most farm subsidies worldwide end up in grain, sugar, dairy, beef and oil crops for animal feed.