SOTEU 2026: Europe on the path to deeper dependencies

In today’s State of the Union address, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, hid behind glossy rhetoric the bleak reality of the Union – in particular in the agriculture, food and energy sectors. “Words are good, deeds are better,” the President underlined, at a time when farmers are experiencing deeds that run in the opposite direction of words: far from reducing dependencies, the policy path driven by the Commission’s President is deepening them. Beyond words of love for farmers, the absence of concrete investment initiatives and of an emergency package to overcome a historic drought is worrying. Targeting 100 territories for water is good, but almost all farmers in Europe are now vulnerable with 70% of EU agriculture land in drought status this summer. 

Fixing leaks in Europe’s water systems is certainly necessary, but it is nowhere near the scale of the agricultural adaptation challenge and of investments needed. Promoting insurance and risk-management tools is indeed key, and Farm Europe has been advocating for it for more than a decade — but it will not replace a strong European budget and an autonomous Common Agricultural Policy. Overall, the policy path outlined by President von der Leyen in her annual address is presented as a strategy to shape an autonomous and sovereign Europe. In reality, it is delivering the opposite for the European agricultural sector.

So far, under the President von der Leyen leadership, the EU’s cereals surplus has been cut in half while 4 million hectares of cereals have disappeared. Wheat imports were multiplied by 2.4 between 2019 and 2023, and EU maize exports have collapsed by 48% since 2019. The livestock sector has lost more than 26 million heads since 2019. ; the EU’s meat trade surplus is down 26% since 2019, from 6.5 to 4.8 million tonnes. Europe has lost 1.37 million family farmers, a fifth of the total. Fertiliser costs have surged to historic levels: nitrogen prices in April 2026 stood 71% above their 2024 average, and EU fertiliser prices rose by a further 13.4% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026 while farm output prices fell by 5.8% according to the last Eurostat sectorial brief. Unfair competition has deepened. Overall, EU agri-food imports are rising almost six times faster than exports. The protein dependency has widened to a record 62.3 million tonnes of net imports of oilseeds and feed materials, up from 58.9 million tonnes in 2019 — with soybean meal imports alone reaching 41.7 million tonnes, 21% above their 2019 level.

The potential strengths and investment capacity of European agriculture are on hold, including when it comes to the bioeconomy. On biofuels and biomethane, where farmers can contribute to shaping a carbon-neutral economy, the potential of agriculture remains frozen by ideological posturing and by a lack of understanding within the European Commission of the economic drivers and the reality of agricultural value chains capable of serving several markets at once. The result is a substitution of dependencies rather than their reduction.

On the global stage, the European Commission has multiplied trade agreements, mostly with agriculture as the banker of the negotiations — including through the unequal treaty with the United States, which commits the EU to 750 billion dollars of American energy purchases and 600 billion dollars of investment in exchange for a 15% tariff ceiling. This is a blow to the European project and to its capacity to demonstrate protection for its citizens and economic actors, farmers included.

Beyond marketing and posturing, farmers urgently need a strong Europe with a common approach — not the continuation of a policy path that leads to market fragmentation, internal competition within the single market, and an absence of level playing field under the pretext of flexibility and do it yourself approaches. This is all the more pressing as the Commission proposes to ring-fence only 300 billion euros for the next long-term budget — a cut of more than 20%, and the disappearance of the CAP as a budget line of its own undermining further visibility and predictability for European farmers and their value chains.

Therefore, Farm Europe calls for resetting the position of agriculture, and of agricultural policy, at its rightful place in the European project, so as to unlock its true potential as a lever for a genuinely sovereign Europe in many fields — because this sector is central not only to food security and health for European citizens, but also to strategic value chains including energy, chemistry, and all the key components of a carbon-neutral economy.