The Europe of 2026 lives within a historical phase ofsystemic competition, which in essence increasingly resembles a return to power politics. Since 2022, the continent has had to come to terms with the end of a long illusion: that of a stable, regulated and predictable international order.
Conventional warfare has returned a few kilometres from the Union’s borders, the Middle East continues to function as a detonator capable of altering energy balances and global trade routes in a matter of weeks, while energy, raw materials and strategic technologies are now openly used as levers of geopolitical pressure. In this scenario, military security, economic security and food security cease to be separate domains and become parts of the same power game

We observe the trajectory of the numbers

In 2024, European NATO member states exceeded USD 380 billion in military spending, marking one of the highest levels since the end of the Cold War. In parallel, the European Union is building its own defence industrial architecture: the SAFE programme, which will mobilise up to EUR 150 billion in loans to strengthen Europe’s military production base, and theEuropean Defence Industry Programme (EDIP), which provides EUR 1.5 billion between 2025 and 2027 to support joint production and joint procurement.

The political signal is unequivocal: defence is once again a structural priority for Europe. Yet, while the continent accelerates on rearmament and rebuilds its military capacity, another historical pillar of European integration quietly enters a phase of equally profound transformation: the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The legislative proposals presented by the European Commission on 16 July 2025 for the CAP 2028-2034 mark a discontinuity that could redefine one of the historical pillars of European integration. For the first time, agricultural policy would be absorbed into a much larger financial container, the National and Regional Partnership Fund (NRPF), shared with other European policies and managed through new National and Regional Partnership Plans.

On paper, the resources remain impressive: at least EUR 300 billion to support the agricultural sector between 2028 and 2034. Of this, 293.7 billion would be dedicated to income support for farmers, while 6.3 billion would feed the new ‘Unity Safety Net’, an instrument designed to intervene in the event of market crises. This means about 900 million per year, almost double the current European agricultural reserve.

Behind the apparent solidity of numbers, however, lies a much deeper institutional transformation

A significant share of the resources would in fact remain not strictly tied to agriculture, but left to the strategic choices of individual states in the new integrated plans.

This is where the most delicate questions arise. Various institutional analyses and the European Court of Auditors itself point to the risk of a de facto renationalisation of the CAP. Not all member states look at this development in the same way: countries with strong agricultural sectors fear that greater national flexibility could turn into internal competition within the single market, while other governments see in the new financial instruments the opportunity to reallocate resources towards industrial, energy or defence priorities, with the risk that the CAP, one of the most integrated instruments in European history, will progressively turn into a sum of national policies, losing its truly “common” character.

In a context in which European public resources are increasingly strained by new strategic priorities, from defence to energy transition, the question becomes inevitable: how much room will be left for a truly common agricultural policy?

The dilemma only appears so as long as we continue to think of public policies as separate compartments, when in the emerging geopolitical context defence, energy, trade and food production actually constitute different expressions of the same security system.

When a military crisis becomes a food crisis

The geopolitical crises of recent years have shown with particular clarity how quickly a conflict can propagate through the entire global economic system from energy markets to supply chains, all the way down to the price of food because contemporary agriculture is not an isolated sector of the real economy but one of the most sensitive nodes of the world’s energy infrastructure: fertilisers, irrigation, logistics, food processing and transport depend on the same energy architecture and, when the latter comes under tension, the effect is inevitably transmitted throughout the entire agri-food chain, turning a geopolitical crisis into a direct factor of economic and social instability.

One only has to shift one’s gaze by a few thousand kilometres to grasp the fragility of the balances on which the global food system rests: a tension in the Strait of Hormuz, a passage through which approximately one fifth of the world’s oil transits, would be enough to generate immediate effects on the international energy markets, a scenario that is far from remote, but which has cyclically emerged during the Middle East crises.

In such cases, the economic sequence is activated with surprising speed

A military crisis in the straits immediately drives up the price of oil and gas. More expensive energy almost automatically translates into more expensive fertilisers, because their industrial production is largely dependent on natural gas. From there, the transition is direct: agricultural production costs rise and, within a few months, food prices also rise.

It is a chain of transmission as simple as it is relentless: from conflict to the price of bread.

When food security becomes political instability

In 2022, after the war in Ukraine and the global energy shock, the FAO food price index increased by more than 30% in a single year. A figure that brought back to the centre of international debate an often forgotten truth in the age of globalisation: food remains one of the most sensitive variables of political stability.

Europe has already seen the signs of this. The agricultural protests that swept through many countries between 2023 and 2024, together with inflationary pressure on foodstuffs, indicate a deeper tension. Food is not only an economic issue: it is a question of social balance.

This is why the Common Agricultural Policy has never been just a sectoral policy. Since the origins of European integration, it has been one of the main instruments of economic and territorial stabilisation of the continent because food security is about more than just the availability of food. It is ultimately about the political stability of societies.

Two sovereignties that support each other

The geopolitical history of the powers suggests a lesson that rarely enters into budgetary debates but runs through the entire history of modern states: military security and food security are two manifestations of the same sovereignty. A resilient agricultural system guarantees strategic autonomy in times of crisis, while a credible defence protects the trade routes, energy infrastructure and logistical chains on which food production and distribution depend. This is why the relationship between the Common Agricultural Policy and European defence escapes the logic of simple public accounting and belongs rather to thearchitecture of power. The nations that go through crises without losing balance are those that defend their borders and, at the same time, preserve their ability to feed their societies. From this perspective, the opposition between rearmament and agriculture appears for what it really is: a false alternative. Because, in the end, the sovereignty of a power is always recognised in the same way: in the ability to defend itself and in the much rarer ability not to depend on others to feed itself.