Press Release – Plant ETP View on the Vision for the Future of Agriculture
Press Release
19th February 2025
Plants for the Future welcomes the EU Commission’s Vision for the Future of Agriculture, which repositions EU agri-food systems as a key strategic asset, emphasises the need to support actors in the transition to more sustainable and resilient systems, and highlights knowledge, research and innovation as catalysts for change.
Today, the long awaited EU Commission’s Vision for the Future of Agriculture was published. This vision for the EU’s agri-food systems for 2040 and beyond, presents a roadmap to guide future EU action. It rightly acknowledges EU agri-food systems as a key strategic asset and the crucial role farmers play as entrepreneurs and innovators, in ensuring food and nutritional security, despite facing a multitude of challenges. We welcome the constructive tone of the vision, which suggest concrete and feasible solutions, acknowledges potential trade-offs and provides guidance on how to deal with them.
We particularly welcome the acknowledgement of the importance of knowledge, research and innovation (R&I) to support the transition towards more sustainable agri-food systems, and the importance of public-private partnerships to ensure research outcomes are fully leveraged for the benefit of agri-food stakeholders, the environment and society.
We also warmly welcome the specific mention of plant breeding innovation and New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), as being part of the solution, and join Commissioner Hansen in hoping for a timely adoption of an enabling legislative text for plants developed using NGTs.
However, it is important to realise that plant breeding represents a very diverse set of practices and tools, that are not limited to NGTs alone. Plant breeding is the heart of our agri-food systems and the future of a circular bioeconomy. In the last two decades, plant breeding alone contributed to 67% of crop productivity in the EU [1]. Plant breeding has a huge potential to support the transition by ensuring high quality and more sustainable food, feed and raw materials, but it is currently not sufficiently supported. In fact, since the EU R&I Framework Programme 7 (FP7, starting in 2007), the allocation of FP funds towards plant breeding related R&I has been decreasing [2].
The characteristics of plant varieties (e.g., yield stability, drought tolerance, disease resistance, nutritional composition) present the first limiting factor at production level, but also throughout the value chain (see figure). Improving farm management practices and the uptake of digitalisation, will only get us so far, if we do not significantly invest in plant breeding R&I.
“We look forward to working with the Commission on how to better leverage the huge potential of plant breeding to support the transition towards more competitive, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems, while ensuring food and nutritional security and supporting a more circular bioeconomy.” says Amrit Nanda, Executive Manager of Plants for the Future.
Download the press release here.
[1] Noleppa, S., & Cartsburg, M. (2021) The socio-economic and environmental value of plant breeding in the EU and selected EU Member States.
[2] Plants for the Future ETP (2025) Trends in European Public Investment in Plant Breeding R&I.