Inflation, rising prices and the cost of living are EU citizens’ top priority in 2026. The current fossil fuel crisis is sparking concerns about rising costs. When it comes to food, emergency measures are no longer enough to ensure consumers have access to healthy food in the long run.
Policymakers should address systemic flaws in the EU’s food system to make it more resilient. When the system fails, consumers pay the consequences, and they do so unequally. Poorer households spend a higher share of their income on food, which means food price spikes hit them the hardest.
Read more: How to protect consumers in (yet) another fossil fuel crisis?
Another fossil fuel crisis, another food price spike?
Food is EU households’ second largest expenditure category, accounting for 13.2% of their total spending on average in 2024. BEUC members regularly monitor product prices, and the conclusion is the same. Food prices have been on the rise for years. Take Denmark, where food prices today are 31% higher than in 2021. Spain draws the same result and consumers in Slovenia are facing a 4.5% annual inflation on food prices.
Looking at specific products, the price of fruit and vegetable that our Dutch member studied greatly increased over the past three years: +25% for courgettes, +30% for green beans or +20% for grapes for example. In France, between April 2022 and April 2023 dairy product prices had increased by 27%, and meat by 10% between November 2024 and November 2025.
After the intensification of the conflict in the Middle East at the beginning of 2026, several voices expressed concerns on how this would reflect on food prices worldwide, and consequently in Europe. In hindsight, the conflict in the Middle East cannot be seen as a unique threat that the bloc can solve with special measures once, to then return to normal. This is impossible because crises have become an intrinsic feature of our food systems.
To name but a few, the 2007-2008 oil shock, the COVID 19 pandemic, the 2021 energy crisis, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, already led to surges in the prices of agricultural inputs. Shortly after, this caused spikes in food prices for consumers. Each time this happened, the EU set emergency measures to limit damages, waiting for the system to quietly return to business as usual.
Why aren’t emergency measures sufficient to address crises?
As long as the price of bread in Brussels continues to depend on whether a gas pipeline in Russia is open, and whether ships can go through the Strait of Hormuz, European food systems cannot be resilient.
Emergency measures (suspending tariffs, compensating for input costs, weakening carbon pricing mechanisms, etc.) have only managed to limit the crisis’ worst consequences. They are effective in the short term, as they provide immediate relief to some of the actors affected by the shock.
But they never properly addressed the roots of the problem. Current food systems are designed to operate in a context that no longer exists. They can provide affordable food in a context where fossil fuels are cheap, with stable geopolitics, and where a Cold War-era trade architecture guarantees stable patterns. These conditions structured the past. Now, each time one of them is unstable, the system breaks down like dominos.
This dependency on external factors is the result of decades of policies that prioritised low prices under ideal conditions over resilience under realistic ones. For decades, policymakers have disguised this system as the only “resilient” option. As long as the price of bread in Brussels continues to depend on whether a gas pipeline in Russia is open, and whether ships can go through the Strait of Hormuz, European food systems cannot be resilient.
In addition, emergency measures have a perverse effect. They end up rewarding the very system that created vulnerability in the first place by removing any incentive to move away from it. They are outsourcing the problem to the future crisis, creating a passing of the baton that makes European food systems less and less resilient to geopolitical shocks.
How can the EU concretely address increasing food price spikes and make it work in the long run?
The EU needs to rebuild its food system to become resilient for the world we actually live in. It is about ensuring that consumers can access food that is genuinely affordable, healthy, sustainably produced, and at a fair price.
Policies to achieve this goal include sustaining crops that fix their own nitrogen rather than depending on gas-linked fertilisers. They make production costs less vulnerable to energy market shocks, and pass that stability onto consumers.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy currently distributes billions in annual support to farmers. It could do more to reward those who reduce their dependence on volatile inputs like synthetic fertilisers, rather than focusing almost exclusively on production volumes. That would give farmers real incentive to change, and financial support to do so.
Read more: The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): What Consumers Want
Shorter, more diversified supply chains would reduce the exposure of European food prices to geopolitical disruptions thousands of kilometres away.
Measures linked to direct consumption can also help. The EU and its Member States can already address high prices by lowering VAT on fruit and vegetables. This would give consumers access to healthier and more affordable foods. In Austria, similar measures are already paying off.
Competition and energy matter too
Companies need to compete fairly on food prices. In the recent inflation crisis, there is evidence that food companies used rising costs as a cover to increase their profit margins beyond what was justified, meaning consumers ended up paying more than they should have. Competition authorities need to step in to investigate and stop this kind of behaviour.
Read more: Why competition authorities must act now against ‘greedflation’
Today, manufacturers can still legally prevent supermarkets in one EU country from buying the same product at a cheaper price in another EU country. This means consumers in some countries pay significantly more for identical products for no good reason. The EU should introduce clear rules on territorial supply constraints to stop these practices and make sure the savings reach consumers.
Finally, the bloc needs to invest in renewables, clean technology, such as affordable heat pumps and electric mobility, and move away from fossil fuels. This is the best way to achieve energy independence and affordable energy prices in the long run. This will, in turn, make the European food market more resilient to price volatility of fossil fuel prices.
All this is not a utopia, it is engineering, and the only way to stop repeating this same conversation in just a few years.