EU経済社会の持続可能性確保に向けたイニシアティブの実現への展望と日本への含意

農業・食料分野を事例として

抄録

　The European Green Deal （EGD） and its sectorial strategy, the Farm to Fork Strategy （F2F） could be seen as intended to promote a growth strategy which creates new sources of competitiveness in the EU’s agriculture and food sectors through a transition to a more environmentally-friendly sustainable food system. This is partly illustrated by the fact that “competitive sustainability” is shown as one of the EU’s objectives in the F2F.

　Against this background, this paper examines whether it is possible to balance competitiveness and sustainability under European-level initiatives such as the EGD and F2F, using the agriculture and food sector, in particular organic farming, as a case study.

　The challenges to balancing these two can be summarised as follows. The first challenge is to improve market value in proportion to the growth of non-market value such as the geographical expansion of organic farming. There may be various paths to cope with this challenge, the discussion focuses on the Geographical Indication （GI） protection system, which can be captured as the quality policy for agricultural and food products. As a more advanced case than Japan, the EU is considering including sustainability criteria as a positive requirement in the GI protection system, which is an attempt to go one step further to achieve compatibility.

　Second, from the data analysis, we showed the importance of linking increasing income and demand to the production promotion of sustainability related products. To deal with this, support measures such as budgets, technical, investment and advisory services, research and development, and the protection systems of intellectual property rights （IPR） are important.

　Thirdly, considering that environmentally-friendly measures such as organic promotion can have negative impacts on production value and farmers’ income through the impacts on markets and trade, appropriate measures including public supports are required to improve yields per unit size of farmland, reduce costs and increase added value through quality improvements and the utilisation of IPR protection systems, which is a medium-term bulk of challenges for achieving competitive sustainability.

　These discussions can also be applied to Japan. In Japan, there is a possibility of increased demand for environmentally-friendly products in the future due to growing interests in global challenges such as climate issues as European countries. Considering the likely negative impacts brought by sustainability-related movements such as organic farming, it is necessary to take the appropriate measures to mitigate negative impacts towards constructing a structure which is compatible between competitiveness and sustainability.