Food can be used as a weapon, warns EC member

Europe needs to be alert to the threat that food supply chains could be used as a weapon, the European Commissioner for Agriculture warned on Saturday, stressing that dependence on external food production would make the EU vulnerable.

„You can't build a continent on an empty stomach and you can't win a war on an empty stomach,“ Christophe's Hansen said at the Munich Security Conference.

„Russia sees grain as its second oil. That's not my words: they say it themselves and they use it massively, so I think we have to deal with our dependencies, because dependencies are vulnerabilities," said the Agriculture and Food Commissioner.

At a discussion on resilience to the use of food as a weapon, Mr Hansen said that if a country is dependent on food imports from Russia, „it is dangerous“.

He said the European Union was heavily dependent on fertiliser imports from Russia and Belarus. This, he said, put the bloc in a „very precarious position“ and „I don't want us to be in the same situation of dependence when it comes to food production“.

„We need to take into account the global impact of the use of food as a weapon“, – said the Commissioner.

„We have to acknowledge that this is a part of hybrid warfare that we have often ignored because it was more convenient, but we have to go to the next level at this critical time“, – he noted.

Ch. Hansen added: "If you talk about security without talking about food, you're only covering half the battlefield."