EU food chief sounds warning on food weaponisation

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MUNICH - Europe must be alert to the threat of food supply chains being weaponised, the EU's agriculture chief warned Saturday, saying dependency on external food production would leave the European Union vulnerable.

"You cannot build a continent on an empty stomach, and you cannot win a war on an empty stomach," Christophe Hansen said at the Munich Security Conference.

"Russia considers grains as its second oil. And it's not me saying that: they say it themselves, and they are using it massively, and I think we need, therefore, to work on our dependencies, because dependencies are vulnerabilities."

During a discussion on resilience against food weaponisation, the European commissioner for agriculture and food said that if a country was dependent on food imports from Russia, "that is dangerous".

Hansen said the European Union had been heavily dependent on fertiliser imports from Russia and Belarus, which put the bloc "in a very dangerous situation", and "I don't want us to drift in the same dependencies when it comes to food production."

"We have to look at the global impact of the weaponisation of food," he said.

"We have to acknowledge that it's part of a hybrid warfare that we often neglected because it was more convenient but we need, in these critical times, to take it to the next level."

Hansen added: "If you are speaking about security without speaking about food, you are just covering half of the battlefield."