Germany wants to make meat and diary more expensive

The new German agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir, wants to raise food prices to reflect the environmental costs and guarantee a fair income for farmers. This would mean that meat could become up to six times more expensive.

Bargain-priced meat

Özdemir, a member of the German Green Party, wants to put a stop to the bargain prices for food – and meat in particular. “A kilo of minced meat for 3.98 euros cannot come from a happy animal”, he said. “No farmer can live off those prices.” According to the minister, the current prices no longer make sense, as they do not take the environmental impact into account in any way.

Last summer, a commission of experts in Germany (the Zukunftskommission Landwirtschaft) already made a series of recommendations to make the agricultural industry more sustainable. The key points included that agriculture must support bio-diversity and the climate, that animals must be treated with respect and that everyone in the production chain is entitled to a fair price. This would, however, result in meat becoming up to six times more expensive. Consumers would also have to pay considerably more for dairy products.

Green transition

According to the committee, the ecological transition is only feasible if the population does not feel it is too much of a burden, even though the entire shift would cost billions annually. Poverty organisations have already called for the government to provide financial support for low-income families when food prices rise.

At the end of 2020, more than a tenth of agricultural land in Germany was occupied by ecological farms. The new government under Olaf Scholz wants to increase that to at least 30 % by 2030. In Belgium, conversely, less than 7 % of the agricultural land was used organically, Belgian newspaper De Standaard writes. In the Dutch-speaking North, that share was even just 1.4 %.