Resilient agri-food systems through EU policy on nutrients? The case of nutrient recovery from wastewater for urban agri-food production

A broad range of challenges, such as climate change and global agri-food supply chain disruptions, have pushed concerns about the resilience of agri-food systems to the centre of European agri-food policy. According to the EU (2022), especially the high dependence of Europe’s agri-food systems on imported fossil fuels, fertilizers, feed, and raw materials requires policy reorientation towards sustainability and resilience. High fertilizer prices, which continued to increase in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, fuel EU policy debates on nutrient recycling. As part of the European Green Deal, the Farm to Fork Strategy and the New Circular Economy Action Plan promote the reduction of nutrient losses, the use of recycled nutrients for the production of organic and waste-based fertilizers and the stimulation of markets for recovered nutrients. The paper asks in how far the EU policy on nutrients enables or restricts novel agri-food systems with nutrient recycling. Building on research on evolutionary policy change (Fitch-Roy et al. 2020) and agri-food system resilience (Buitenhuis et al. 2020), the paper first discusses how the EU policy on nutrients adapted to resilience thinking over time. While in the 2000s policy attention was directed towards environmental problems caused by nutrients (eutrophication) and resource scarcity (peak phosphorous), the policy focus broadened since the mid-2010s to nutrient recycling as a means to support the EU circular economy approach and to enhance nutrient efficiency, self-sufficiency, economic value and the use of secondary nutrient sources for closing the nutrient-food loop. To assess to what degree the EU policy on nutrients engages with novel agri-food systems and creates a resilience-enabling environment, we use the case of a novel agri-food system that connects the wastewater treatment and agri-food production sectors and envisions the transformation of a conventional treatment plant into a ‘NEWtrient®-Center’, which draws the essential resources for urban hydroponic plant cultivation from municipal wastewater (Keuter et al. 2021). The analysis shows that while the increasing salience of the resilience concept in the EU policy on nutrients opens a policy window in general, many cross-sectoral policy obstacles remain (Schwindenhammer/Gonglach 2021) that substantiate the need for policy change in EU water, waste and fertilizer policy. Buitenhuis, Y., Candel, J.J.L., Termeer, K.J.A.M., Feindt, P.H. (2020). Does the Common Agricultural Policy enhance farming systems’ resilience? Applying the Resilience Assessment Tool (ResAT) to a farming system case study in the Netherlands. Journal of Rural Studies 80, 314–327. European Commission (2022). Safeguarding food security and reinforcing the resilience of food systems. COM(2022)133 final. Brussels. Fitch-Roy, O., Benson, D., Monciardini, D. (2020). Going around in circles? Conceptual recycling, patching and policy layering in the EU circular economy package. Environmental Politics 29(6), 983–1003. Keuter, V., Deck, S., Giesenkamp, H., Gonglach, D., Katayama, V. T., et al… (2021). Significance and Vision of Nutrient Recovery for Sustainable City Food Systems in Germany by 2050. Sustainability 13(19), 10772. Schwindenhammer, S., Gonglach, D. (2021). SDG Implementation through Technology? Governing Food-Water-Technology Nexus Challenges in Urban Agriculture. Politics and Governance 9(1), 176–186.