10/08/2005
Sustainable development
EU strategy for sustainable development

After the Johannesburg Summit, CIAA has stressed the importance of the EU taking the lead in the follow-up process by translating its political ambitions into concrete action.

Key areas for EU action are water and energy with further progress on the EU initiatives and the development of the 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable production and consumption. Other actions are also taken in the field of agriculture and rural development, fisheries, chemicals, globalisation and trade.

Our commitment to sustainable development remains the key driver for European food and drink industry to address those issues.

This commitment can be summarised as such:

• Protecting natural resources for their long term availability and minimising waste along the supply chain;
• Ensuring quality and safety of food and drink products;
• Optimising costs.

Food and drink companies are committed to continue raising their environmental performance through on-going improvements to their products and processes. As such a decoupling between economic growth and resource consumption has already been achieved. Social and environmental considerations are also becoming more and more part of food and drink companies’ strategies and management.

Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the EU food and drink industry has made sustainable development one of its key priorities.

However, the EU should create the necessary conditions for industry to become a strong partner in a global strategy for more equitable growth and sustainable development as well as to achieve the Lisbon objectives.

Introducing ever more stringent EU and national regulations should not be contemplated as the only approach for encouraging companies to devise proactive environmental strategies. Spontaneous initiatives which go beyond what is required by legislators (e.g. proactive initiatives in the areas of technological innovation, environmental management, investments, multi-stakeholder partnerships, etc.) can also generate much greater progress than classical environmental legislation.

The development of an environmental policy geared to sustainable development must therefore create a context that encourages initiatives by companies for environmental protection and must be organised on the basis of the following three fundamental principles:

• Ensuring the greatest possible environmental effectiveness thanks to stable and clear environmental objectives for the long term as well as a supportive policy framework.
• Promoting a quest for maximum economic efficiency in pursuit of environmental objectives.
• Ensuring coherence between environmental objectives and other objectives (economic, social, etc.) pursued by society.