The Farm to Fork Strategy: a post-exceptionalist breakthrough or more of the same?

The European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy was widely lauded as a potential game-changer in the EU’s governance of agricultural and food systems during its adoption in 2020. By encompassing the whole value chain, from primary production to consumer, and formulating various ambitious targets, the strategy could be considered a first step towards an EU Common Food Policy. In ensuing years, however, the legal implementation of the strategy has faced considerable political backlash, partly fueled by new concerns emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Indeed, some commentators have argued that the Farm to Fork agenda has largely been dismantled as a result of shifting political constellations. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this debate by analyzing the extent to which the Farm to Fork Strategy’s adoption was complemented by a shift in EU agricultural governance arrangements. More specifically, we pose the question of whether the strategy contributed to an acceleration of post-exceptionalism in agricultural policymaking or, rather, eventually boiled down to a prevailing of exceptionalist features in new clothes. Using different indicators, we assess four dimensions of post-exceptionalism: ideas (key concepts used in COM documents), interests (transparency register entries), policies (realization of Commission’s work programs) and institutions (based on qualitative interviews). Preliminary results suggest that whereas the Von der Leyen Commission included a broader range of ideas in agricultural policy documents and consulted a wider range of interests, ultimate policy outputs showed only incremental changes, while institutional configurations continue to favor traditional agricultural interests. We suggest that genuine political and institutional change may be a precondition to realizing policy outcomes that would be needed to address urgent food system challenges.