Farm Europe presents new study on water resilience at the European Parliament on 8 September

Following another summer of severe drought, extreme heat and growing pressure on water resources, Farm Europe is repeatedly calling for a shift from crisis management to prevention, resilience and investment to strengthen the competitiveness of European agriculture. And this can be achieved with a political will and target amendments to the CAP set of proposals and other legislative dossiers, such as the European Competitiveness Fund.

Farm Europe will present its new in-depth study on water at the European Parliament on 8 September at 17:30, at an event hosted by MEP Carmen Crespo (Spain, EPP).

The study examines the water situation across the EU and its regional dimension, and start reflecting on setting out recommendations to address the growing challenges facing European farming.

“Europe cannot afford to wait for the next crisis. The time has come not only to manage the consequences of water scarcity but also to prevent them. Europe needs a long-term strategy based on prevention, resilience and investment,” says Luc Vernet, Secretary General of Farm Europe.

Farm Europe calls in particular for the future European Competitiveness Fund to support strategic investments in water resilience, including water-storage infrastructure, digital technologies to improve water efficiency and measures to protect water quality.

The study also highlights the contribution of agriculture, livestock farming and the wider bioeconomy to building more resilient European territories.

The presentation will be followed by a roundtable with MEPs, EU institutions, agricultural stakeholders, experts and Farm Europe members and partners, focusing on how water management can help secure the future competitiveness and resilience of European farming.

Europe’s water crisis is here. The time to act is now.

The event takes place on Tuesday, 8 September 2026, from 17:30 to 19:00 at the European Parliament in Brussels.

Registration for stakeholders and media: https://forms.gle/4LukUhDpS25frGvv7

Farm Europe welcomes the adoption by the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development of targeted amendments to simplify the Industrial Emissions Directive (IED), in particular the clarification related to cattle that should not be included in the scope of this regulation, neither be assessed by the European Commission in this context, and the principle of proportionality by reverting to fixed capacity thresholds for other livestock installations.

The approach proposed by ComAGRI would provide clarity for the ruminant sector and send a clear signal : cattle should not be included in the IED, and this option shall not be assessed by the European Commission. In addition, through fixed capacity standards rather than complex livestock unit calculations, reducing compliance burden for operators while maintaining the highest environmental standards globally.  Fixed capacity thresholds for pigs and poultry return to the original framework, restoring the regulatory clarity and certainty that producers need. 

An extended timeline for uniform operating conditions (September 2027 rather than 2026) would provide competent authorities and the sector adequate time for implementation, including Commission impact assessment of proposed measures.

The amendments balance administrative simplification with environmental effectiveness as they remove redundant complexity without reducing protection for soil, water, and air.

The only aspect we regret is the adoption of Compromise 2 on the aggregation rule, as it does not fully reflect the objective of simplification and risks introducing additional costs and administrative burdens, particularly for smaller companies. In our view, it would be preferable to delete the aggregation requirement altogether.

Farm Europe thanks to rapporteur Christine Singer for her work on the file, and all MEPs involved and encourages the Environment Committee and the European Parliament to align with the AGRI position during the legislative process. Maintaining consistency is essential for coherent climate and circular economy policy.

Eat Europe and Farm Europe warmly welcome the entry into force, as of 3 September, of the European Commission’s decision excluding Brazil from the list of Countries authorised to export products of animal origin to the European Union unless compliance with European rules on the use of antimicrobials can be demonstrated.

This is an important day and a concrete step forward in the efforts that Eat Europe, Farm Europe and their members have been pursuing for a long time to achieve true reciprocity. The principle is simple and fundamental: there cannot be different standards depending on whether a product is produced within the European Union or imported from a third country. European rules on food safety and the use of antimicrobials must be consistently applied and enforced throughout the entire supply chain.

But this achievement must translate into the effective enforcement of the rules.

Recent information made public by the Brazilian authorities and representatives of the livestock sector regarding the new certification protocol intended to ensure compliance with EU requirements on the use of antimicrobials raises concerns that cannot be ignored. 

According to information provided by the Brazilian authorities and industry representatives themselves, the certification system is still at an early stage, and no farms have yet been certified under the new protocol. This indicates that the practical implementation of the system and the verification of effective compliance are still being established.

The European Union’s standards concerning the prohibition of certain antimicrobials in animals intended for export are not new. These requirements have been applicable since 2023 and exporting countries have had sufficient time to adapt. Compliance with EU legislation cannot depend solely on future commitments or certification systems that have yet to demonstrate their effectiveness in practice.

For this reason, Farm Europe and Eat Europe call on the European Commission to maintain a strict and precautionary approach, strengthening official controls on imports of beef from Brazil. The competent Brazilian authorities must provide robust, verifiable and reliable guarantees that all products exported to the European Union fully comply with European requirements.

“The Brazilian experience reaffirms the importance of strengthening controls, certifications, and verification procedures for the production systems of exporting countries, rather than relying solely on checks at the border,” said Luigi Scordamaglia, President of Eat Europe. “The focus must shift from ex-post controls to ensuring, throughout the entire supply chain, production conditions equivalent to those applied in Europe.”

The protection of European consumers must remain an absolute priority. At the same time, it is essential to protect European operators who comply with stringent standards every day and bear the costs associated with implementing EU rules. And this is true not only as regards compliance with our veterinary legislation, but this must also apply to the requirements concerning traceability and the ban on imports of Brazilian products derived from GMOs that are not authorised in the European Union.

“The credibility of the European food safety system depends on the ability to apply the same rules to everyone”, added Yves Madre, President of Farm Europe. “Any disparity in the enforcement of standards would risk undermining consumer confidence, placing compliant European producers at a disadvantage and weakening the very principle of reciprocity. It is a matter not only of fairness but of political credibility as well. Members of the European Parliament are crystal clear with a very large majority of Comagri members tabling amendments to single CMO reform requiring imported products to meet EU production standards“. 

3 September is therefore an important day: not an end point, but a step forward in building true reciprocity. 

As negotiations on the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) enter a decisive phase, Farm Europe is launching its CAP 2028–2034 Budget Simulator: an interactive online tool that allows decision makers, analysts and farmers alike to model the financial architecture of the future CAP and to measure, in real time and at different scales, the concrete consequences of the choices currently on the table at EU, national and farm level.

In its July 2025 proposal, the European Commission (EC) set out to merge the budgets of the main European policies, including the CAP, into a single National and Regional Partnership (NRP) Fund, leaving Member States far greater freedom to arbitrate the allocation of funds previously ringfenced for a given policy. Behind the headline figures, the real impact of such a reform on farmers, on Member States and on Europe’s food sovereignty depends on a dense web of technical parameters. The Budget Simulator was built to make that complexity legible by all.

The tool lets the user on one hand observe in fixed scenarios, the impact of an unamended CAP regulation’s proposal, and on the other hand in a user driven scenario, set the macro parameters of the future CAP, the ring-fenced CAP envelope, the Member State co-financing commitment, as well as possible future parameters such as the potential flexibility available for frontloading, and the rural development target, and then watch these choices cascade to all 27 Member States according to the allocation keys and Member States’ individual priorities. 

From there, the user can drill into any Member State to re-allocate EU funds across the different NRP interventions of the new Single CAP Fund Regulation, adjust national co-financing rates, and observe the effect at Member state level and on both EU and Total Public Expenditure, while keeping in consideration indicators such as environmental spending floors and minimum co-financing thresholds.

Every projection is compared against the 2021–2027 CAP Strategic Plan baseline, so the variation induced by each scenario is immediately visible as we at Farm Europe have considered said baselines to project the allocations each Member State’s CAP Strategic Plan would consist of. 

Beyond the budgetary tables, the simulator translates figures into real-world effects: a farm-level impact view estimates income effects by country, farm type and economic size; a choropleth map of Europe compares the variation across Member States; and an intervention-mapping table traces how each current CAP measure maps onto the new framework. Two ready-made scenarios – the Commission’s July 2025 proposal, an amended Commission scenario (based partially on the letter of EC Commission president U. Von der Leyen) – and a fully manual mode provide immediate reference points for the negotiation as well as a wide range of possibilities.

The simulator is grounded entirely in official sources: the 2021–2027 CAP Strategic Plans Regulation, the Commission’s July 2025 legislative proposals for the Single CAP Fund and the NRP Fund, the Performance Framework Regulation and its environmental tracking coefficients, and Member States’ approved CSP financial tables. Farm Europe developed this tool in the conviction that a transparent, evidence-based analysis is the best guarantee of a strong, autonomous and properly funded Common Agricultural Policy.

Link to the Budget Simulator:
https://www.farm-europe.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/CAP_simulator_PUBLIC_final.html

One week after releasing the Delegated Act of the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming framework, the European Commission has, today, presented its Emissions Trading System revision, committing only to assess — in a 2034 review — the possibility of selling carbon farming credits on the ETS market and allowing Member States to mobilise ETS revenues to support investments to reduce agricultural emissions linked to smart fertilisation, including farmers’ uptake of bio-based, organic and circular fertilisers.

Farm Europe and Eat Europe assess positively those initial steps, but regret the move to re-integrate international carbon credits, which risk diverting demand away from domestic solutions and investment in Europe, and the further delayed recognition of carbon farming credits. We also regret that the ETS revision does not propose to clearly suspend the application of the ETS and CBAM to fertilizers — which would shift the incentive away from penalising production and towards stimulating demand for low-carbon fertilisers. At the very least, the prolongation of free allowances should be paired with a revised CBAM trajectory and with the possibility to sell carbon farming credits into the ETS.

Farm Europe and Eat Europe  urge both the Commission and the co-legislators not to further postpone the possibility to connect Carbon Farming CRCF credits to the ETS, creating a true business model for emission reduction in agriculture, in Europe. Although the proposal anticipates a review in 2034 and subsequent consideration of the inclusion of credits from carbon farming, carbon farming needs a market now. Agriculture is a building block of the defossilisation of a large part of the EU economy, well beyond the food market. The agricultural sector requires large scale investments and policy coherence to be in a position to provide circular, biogenic carbon, essential to lay down the foundation of a competitive carbon neutral economy.

“The adoption of the carbon farming methodologies last week associated with the commitment from the Commission to examine direct links between CRCF and ETS are encouraging developments in the effort to create a true leverage for emission reduction in agriculture”, reacted Luc Vernet, Secretary General of Farm Europe, adding, “now is the time to move from concepts to concrete decisions. Farmers can’t wait 2034 to be fairly rewarded for their emission reduction efforts”.

As for free allocation, we welcome the proposal to slow the reduction of free allowances for CBAM-covered sectors and to extend the phase-out of free allowances until 2038. However, this extension must necessarily be accompanied by a revision of the trajectory of the CBAM for fertilisers.

“The two mechanisms are intrinsically linked and should operate in a coordinated manner. Extending free allocation while maintaining the CBAM for fertilisers would result in divergences between two instruments designed to address the same carbon leakage risk, undermining the coherence and effectiveness of the EU carbon pricing framework,” said Luigi Scordamaglia, President of Eat Europe.

Voluntary carbon markets currently do not offer real and predictable opportunities to allow farmers to trigger investments in emission reduction and carbon removals, including in low carbon fertilisers. The ETS revision is a unique opportunity to close this gap. It sets out how domestic permanent carbon removals could be accounted for within the trading system to help address residual emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. The European Commission will examine how carbon farming and nature-based carbon sequestration units could in future qualify as permanent removals — of which, at this stage, only BioCCS and DACCS are included in the ETS. 

In addition, the Commission proposes to channel part of ETS revenues to investments to reduce agricultural emissions linked to more efficient use of fertilisers and to support farmers in the uptake of bio-based, organic and circular fertilisers. The modernisation fund will also support investments in lead markets for the production of affordable low-carbon and bio-based fertilisers.

Farm Europe regrets the missed opportunity resulting from today’s vote in the European Parliament’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI), which endorsed compromise amendments maintaining the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) performance framework within the proposed horizontal Regulation on budget expenditure tracking and performance.

While the adopted compromise introduces some improvements to the European Commission’s initial proposal, it ultimately fails to safeguard the CAP’s specific governance and accountability architecture. By keeping the CAP performance framework outside the CAP Regulation, the AGRI Committee has endorsed an approach that risks weakening the policy’s coherence and effectiveness.

The CAP is a unique common European policy with its own objectives, governance system and delivery model. Its performance framework should therefore remain embedded in the CAP legislative framework, where indicators and monitoring tools can be designed to properly reflect the realities of agriculture and rural development.

Moving these provisions into a horizontal regulation covering a wide range of EU policies creates a precedent that could gradually dilute the CAP’s autonomy and undermine the policy’s ability to demonstrate its contribution to Europe’s strategic priorities, including food security, competitiveness, resilience and environmental sustainability.

As discussions on the future Multiannual Financial Framework and the post-2027 CAP continue, Farm Europe calls on the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission to restore a CAP’s dedicated performance architecture during the forthcoming interinstitutional negotiations. Preserving the integrity of the CAP’s governance framework remains essential to ensuring that the policy can effectively respond to the challenges facing European agriculture.

Farm Europe and Eat Europe are closely following negotiations on the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF) and welcome the positive progress made in the European Parliament, with the aim to increasingly recognise the strategic role of agriculture and the entire agri-food chain in strengthening Europe’s competitiveness, resilience and security.

From the very beginning of the legislative process, as Farm Europe and Eat Europe we suggested amendments aimed at ensuring that agriculture, food and the broader bioeconomy remain at the heart of the ECF. These efforts have shown to be fundamental in preventing attempts to marginalise the sector by removing its dedicated place within both the European Competitiveness Fund and Horizon Europe.

After a difficult start, with some ideas within Itre committee proposing to dilute agriculture within a broader chapter on so-called “Sustainable Prosperity”, the discussions now emerging among negotiators in the ITRE Committee represents an encouraging step in the right direction. It reflects a growing recognition that agriculture and food are not only beneficiaries of competitiveness policies, but essential drivers of Europe’s industrial strength, innovation capacity, strategic autonomy and economic resilience.

As negotiations continue, it is now essential to build on this momentum by ensuring that agriculture and the entire agri-food value chain receive the recognition they deserve through dedicated funding opportunities across the relevant ECF priorities. Investments supporting the digital transition, clean energy, sustainable water management, strategic stockpiling, innovation and industrial transformation are indispensable to unlock the sector’s full potential and close the existing investment gap.

The European Parliament now has the opportunity to send a strong political signal by confirming agriculture and food as strategic pillars of the European Competitiveness Fund. We encourage all political groups to confirm these first positive outcomes in the final report. It is crucial that the European Parliament’s final position reflects the AGRI Committee’s recommendations and ensures greater alignment with the Commission’s proposals and the Council’s position, recognising the strategic importance of the sector and the need for dedicated support to enable it to continue driving Europe’s competitiveness, sustainability and security.

Farm Europe and Eat Europe welcome the strong political message delivered at the latest Agriculture and Fisheries Council, where ten Member States, led by Italy and supported by several other ministers during the debate, called on the European Commission to reverse the proposed cuts to the EU agricultural promotion budget.

This initiative confirms the concerns that Farm Europe and Eat Europe first raised when the Commission announced its intention to reduce the 2027 promotion budget by almost 50%, from €205 million to €112 million. Such a decision would weaken one of the EU’s most effective instruments to strengthen the competitiveness of its agri-food sector.

“EU promotion policy is not a cost but a strategic investment,” said Yves Madre, President of Farm Europe. “It is essential to promote the European production model, its high environmental, social and quality standards, while supporting farmers’ incomes and helping European businesses expand into new markets. At a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty, shifting trade relations and an accelerating race to open new export opportunities, this policy is more strategic than ever.”

Farm Europe and Eat Europe underline that promotion policy generates tangible economic value by supporting quality schemes, geographical indications, and the international competitiveness of European agriculture. It is also a key instrument to ensure that consumers around the world recognise the added value of European products and the standards behind them.

“Even more worrying than the scale of the cut is that promotion is repeatedly considered a “disposable” policy. One year the budget is increased, the next it is drastically reduced, while resources are shifted between different budget lines – to the detriment of the predictability that farmers and agri-food businesses need,” said Luigi Scordamaglia, President of Eat Europe. “This creates the impression that the Commission is simply taking money away with one hand and returning part of it with the other, without any real reinforcement of the promotion policy. Such an approach undermines the confidence of businesses and Member States and makes long-term planning virtually impossible.” 

Farm Europe and Eat Europe call on the European Commission to heed the clear message sent by Member States and restore a promotion budget that reflects the strategic importance of the policy. If the EU is serious about strengthening its agricultural sector and expanding its presence in global markets, its political ambitions must be backed by stable and adequate financial resources.

The European Parliament today adopted, by 388 votes in favour, 248 against and 24 abstentions, the objection to the delegated act, which would have classified soy as a high indirect land-use change (ILUC) risk feedstock and phased out its contribution to the EU renewable energy targets by 2030.

Farm Europe welcomes this vote, which should not be read as a step back from the Union’s commitment to fight deforestation but as an opportunity to improve Europe’s approach to biofuels. The Parliament rejected today a methodology that would have applied a general principle of exclusion to soy, without differentiating the actual risk across diverse regional situations and without recognising the important contribution of EU-grown soy to the Union’s food and feed challenge.

Farm Europe fully supports the phasing out of feedstocks highly connected to deforestation, in particular palm oil. However, in Europe, soy is a multi-purpose crop, all value chains being equally important to the viability of this crop. Within EU biorefineries, the complementarity between biofuels, food and feed should be fully recognised, in particular in the context of the protein strategy presented by the European Commission on the 7th of July. Excluding soy from the biofuels market would have further undermined the business model for growing soy in the EU, at the very moment when the Union is seeking to strengthen, not weaken, its protein autonomy and strategic resilience.

Farm Europe now calls on the European Commission to come forward swiftly with a revised delegated act that maintains the phase-out of feedstocks for which a significant expansion into land with high carbon stock is observed, while introducing a robust, science-based, origin-differentiated assessment. Since soy is covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), country benchmarking under that Regulation provides a ready-made basis: soy originating from countries classified as low deforestation risk — including soy cultivated in the EU under stringent Union environmental, climate and biodiversity standards and contributing to diversified rotations and soil fertility — should remain eligible for the purpose of RED sustainability compliance.

Farm Europe further reiterates its call for the creation of a Sustainable Biofuels category, deforestation-free and CAP-compliant, recognising the specificities of food and feed crop-based biofuels that meet the sustainability standards attached to the Common Agricultural Policy, in particular conditionality.

Today’s adoption by the European Commission of the EU Protein Plan, a plan for resilience, strategic autonomy and sustainability of the EU protein system, adopted together with the Livestock Strategy is a positive step forward. Farm Europe particularly welcomes the long awaited recognition, by the European Commission, of the role of “Made in Europe” Biofuels as a major strategic lever for both proteins and energy, those two value chains being inter-connected.  

The plan marks a long-awaited recognition that the Union’s dependence on imported high-protein feed is not merely an agricultural issue but a strategic vulnerability. In 2025, only 25.8% of the protein from oilseeds and protein crops used as feed in the EU was sourced domestically, leaving supply chains exposed to geopolitical and market shocks. Against this background, the plan sets a benchmark of 35% of EU-sourced high-protein feed by 2035 and is built on three pillars: expanding sustainable EU protein supply, improving the resilience, competitiveness and preparedness of the wider EU protein system, and strengthening value chains by incentivising demand and promoting local solutions and short supply chains.

The approach underpinning the plan is to be welcome as well : an incentive-based approach that offers farmers a profitable future in producing protein in Europe. However, concrete proposals shall be made in order to truly incentive high value protein supply chains as well as develop a true business model for carbon farming. 

In this context, Farm Europe underlines that the cap on EU food and feed crops used in biofuels limit the capacity to foster dual purposes – food and non food – value chains. Moving toward 10% home-grown biofuels would not only offer new market opportunities for farmers, but also help cutting transport emissions by more than 80 million tonnes per year, while allowing to reach 50 million tonnes of inter-connected high value protein products and therefore covering 75% of EU pure protein needs (instead of today’s 25%). 

Background 

A long awaited protein strategy that paves the way for a new dynamic of investments

1) EXPANDING EU PROTEIN SUPPLY

The plan places incentives for farmers at the heart of the transition. It encourages Member States to mobilise coupled income support, Agri-Environmental and Climate Actions and, as the new transition payments proposed under the future CAP, conceived as de-risking instruments covering the investment and adaptation costs of introducing protein crops into rotations. Farm Europe also welcomes the establishment of a dedicated protein crop sector under the CAP post-2027, with mandatory recognition of producer and interbranch organisations and sectoral interventions supporting investment, innovation, marketing, storage and risk management. With over EUR 190 million already invested in research and innovation on protein crops, strengthened knowledge transfer and advisory services will be essential to turn these investments into results on the ground.

The emphasis on legumes in rotation, which reduce fertiliser needs and greenhouse gas emissions through nitrogen fixation, ensures consistency with the Fertiliser Action Plan. Equally positive is the recognition of the role of grasslands, which contribute to carbon sequestration, reduce dependence on imported feed and help address land abandonment, a growing structural risk for European agriculture. The development of a certification methodology under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF), covering practices that reduce N₂O emissions through the use of leguminous crops, should finally open access to carbon incentives for protein crop farmers.

2) CIRCULARITY AND BIOFUELS

The plan acknowledges that co-products from processed crops account for around 34% of the protein intake of EU livestock, and that co-products from EU energy applications alone represent 47.2% of all oilseed meals used in the Union. This is a decisive recognition of a reality Farm Europe has long highlighted: EU biofuel production and protein autonomy go hand in hand, as the domestic crushing of oilseeds delivers at the same time home-grown energy and high-quality feed protein, within integrated biorefineries anchored in rural territories.

The review of the Renewable Energy Directive should assess how to increase the production of home-grown sustainable biofuels, protein crops and feedstocks. Farm Europe calls on the Commission to translate this commitment into a stable and ambitious post-2030 framework for crop-based biofuels and integrated biorefineries, which remain the most immediate lever to reduce simultaneously the EU’s protein and energy dependencies. The up-coming energy omnibus should also be an opportunity to increase the potential of this value chains without waiting until 2030. 

3) RESILIENCE OF SUPPLY CHAINS: PRODUCE FIRST, DIVERSIFY SECOND

The plan’s clear-sighted assessment of the EU’s near-total dependency on imported vitamins and amino acids, concentrated in East Asia, calls for action. The announced study on these dependencies, the exploration of possibilities under the future European Competitiveness Fund to support EU production capacity for feed additives, the continued simplification of feed additive rules in the context of the Food and Feed Omnibus, and the attention given to market transparency, stockpiling and joint procurement within the European Food Security Crisis preparedness and response Mechanism are steps in the right direction.

On trade, the plan is explicit that the objective is not to replace one supplier with another, but to reduce overall dependency while diversifying sources. This logic must translate into a clear hierarchy: EU production first, diversification second. Ukraine was identified as the main partner for diversification, having doubled its production of high-protein crops in recent years. Conversely, consolidating reliance on Mercosur suppliers cannot be the answer to a dependency that the plan itself identifies as a strategic vulnerability.

We also welcome the commitment to better align production standards applying to imported products, in line with the principle of reciprocity, and the plan’s acknowledgement that the EU is among the most efficient global producers of animal protein in terms of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of output, so that reducing EU animal production would largely shift consumption, and emissions, towards more carbon-intensive imports. 

4) STIMULATING DEMAND AND EUROPEAN PREFERENCE

On the demand side, the plan mobilises origin labelling through marketing standards for protein crops, the integration of pulses into the upcoming “Buy European” campaign, public procurement based on a “best value” approach rewarding quality and sustainability efforts, and educational measures under the EU school scheme. Farm Europe particularly welcomes the emergence of a genuine European preference dimension, whose absence we regretted in the Livestock Strategy. The commitment to develop voluntary labels or optional reserved terms certifying that livestock products are produced exclusively using EU, national, regional or local feed will further help valorise local feed value chains.

5) GOVERNANCE AND MEANS

The credibility of the plan will ultimately depend on its implementation. The 35% objective is a benchmark rather than a binding target, and the plan is not accompanied by a dedicated budgetary programme: it relies on the mobilisation of existing and future instruments, namely the CAP post-2027, the National and Regional Partnership Plans and the European Competitiveness Fund, complemented by public-private partnerships with financial institutions. Progress will be monitored through annual protein dialogues with Member States and the market observatory for cereals, oilseeds and protein crops. Farm Europe regrets that the level of ambition is not matched by equally firm delivery mechanisms, and calls on Member States to make full use of the available tools, and on the Commission to ensure that the protein dialogues translate into measurable progress on the ground. The negotiations on the next multiannual financial framework will be the first test of this collective ambition.