Meedendorp, who is taking part in the strategic dialogue, at least welcomed the Polish Commissioner’s “focus” on “young farmers, land use” and preventing price gouging.

Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts for Sustainable Food Systems (IPES), said that while some of the proposals were interesting, particularly “that they seek to protect small food producers from excessive buyer power, the entire document is based on the false premise that farmers’ livelihoods and environmental goals such as soil health and biodiversity are in conflict.”

“They are not,” said De Schutter, who was the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014. “No scientist would support the view that long-term food security depends on the removal of environmental constraints imposed on farmers… (Unfortunately) Commissioner Wojciechowski’s paper is based on political calculation rather than sound scientific expertise.”

What is most worrying, according to Dutch scientist Jeroen Candel, is the way in which the document propagates a distorted concept of food security that “has nothing to do with the challenges of food security in the true sense, but only with the discourse on food security that aims to maintain the current agricultural system.”

“This is just ridiculous,” he concluded, and “selling this as necessary for food security is just nonsense.”