Tchoukanov: European livestock cannot wait for the next crisis

By G. Bacolas

In Brussels, animal disease is no longer discussed solely as a matter for veterinary authorities. Every new outbreak leaves behind far more than sanitary restrictions: depleted herds, closed markets, farmers waiting for compensation and entire livestock regions struggling to return to normal.

Against this backdrop, Stoyan Tchoukanov, president of the European Economic and Social Committee’s Section for Agriculture, Rural Development and the Environment (NAT), and himself a livestock farmer, has continued to press a position he has articulated repeatedly in recent months: Europe cannot build its policy around crisis management alone. It must invest far more in prevention before the next outbreak occurs.

The September 11 debate in Brussels on animal diseases, zoonoses and sustainable EU livestock gave further substance to that argument. It also raised a question with direct relevance well beyond Brussels, including for Greece: how resilient can a livestock sector really be if policy only begins to move once losses are already being counted?

The meeting brought together the European Commission, researchers, livestock organisations, the meat trade and environmental groups. Tchoukanov opened and closed the session, which included Francisco Reviriego, head of the Animal Health Unit at the European Commission’s DG SANTE; Muriel Figuié of CIRAD; Stéphane Jeanne of FESASS; Zeev Noga of UECBV; and Isabel Paliotta of the European Environmental Bureau.

The scope of the discussion went far beyond the handling of an individual disease once it emerges. Europe’s preparedness for new threats linked to climate change, the resilience of livestock value chains, disruption to international trade, public confidence and the role of biodiversity in reducing zoonotic risks were all placed on the table.

Tchoukanov’s message afterwards was straightforward: prevention must remain at the heart of Europe’s response.

But this was not a position born out of a single meeting.

A message Tchoukanov has been repeating for months

A closer look at Tchoukanov’s interventions over recent months reveals a consistent line of argument: Europe remains much better at managing a crisis once it has erupted than at preventing it in the first place.

In August, writing in Agrocapital about the devastating wildfires that had swept parts of Europe, Tchoukanov addressed essentially the same problem through a different lens. In “Farmers on the front line of climate resilience,” he linked land abandonment and the decline of grazing to the growing vulnerability of rural areas to fire.

The argument was that an active farmer or livestock producer is not merely an economic unit. Farmers manage land, landscapes and productive ecosystems every day. When they disappear from rural areas, Europe also loses part of its capacity to defend itself against future crises.

The same reasoning is now being carried from the fire front to the farmyard.

A robust animal-health system does not begin when movement restrictions are imposed. It begins much earlier — with surveillance, functioning veterinary services, biosecurity, research and farms that have the financial capacity to implement the measures being asked of them.

The continuity can also be seen in earlier interventions.

In July, Agrocapital reported Tchoukanov’s position under the headline “Without farmers, biodiversity cannot be protected.” His argument then was that farmers, livestock producers, fishers and land managers cannot be treated simply as the recipients of decisions made in Brussels. They must be involved not only in shaping policy but also in implementing it.

That principle becomes particularly important when the discussion turns to zoonoses. A protocol may be technically sound on paper, yet extremely difficult to apply on a small or medium-sized family farm if its economic cost has been overlooked.

The same thread had emerged even earlier, during the debate over the future of European livestock farming. In June, when Agrocapital reported on the first signals surrounding a new European livestock strategy, Tchoukanov argued against separating environmental sustainability from the sector’s economic and social viability.

The principle is fundamental: livestock farming cannot be described as sustainable if it meets environmental targets while steadily losing the people who produce the food.

Even during his 2025 intervention in Rome on regenerative agriculture, Tchoukanov linked soil protection and biodiversity with the economic empowerment of farmers. As Agrocapital reported at the time in “Europe’s voice for regenerative agriculture in Rome,” the debate over Europe’s food systems cannot be reduced to productivity and yields alone.

Taken together, these interventions are not four separate arguments. They are four versions of the same proposition: resilience is built before a crisis begins, and it requires farmers to remain inside the system rather than at its margins.

From “One Health” to the reality of the farm

The concept of One Health now sits at the centre of Europe’s animal-health debate. Human health, animal health and the condition of the environment are increasingly treated as interconnected rather than separate policy areas. Climate change, shifting disease vectors, trade in animals and animal products and the degradation of ecosystems are all capable of redrawing Europe’s map of risk.

For livestock farmers, however, One Health will ultimately be judged through much more practical questions.

Will a veterinarian be available when needed? Will an outbreak be detected quickly? Will farms actually be able to afford and implement meaningful biosecurity measures? Can a disease be contained before an entire region is effectively shut down? And if a herd is lost, how quickly can the farmer return to production?

Greece already knows how difficult those questions can become.

Recent animal-health crises have shown how rapidly a disease affecting livestock can turn into a crisis for an entire local economy. Culling does not merely remove animals from a register. It destroys productive capital that may have taken years to build. Movement restrictions do not affect a single farm in isolation. They reach slaughterhouses, transport companies, traders, feed suppliers and the wider regional value chain.

This is why the discussion opened by NAT carries greater weight than another institutional debate in Brussels.

It is linked to the Sustainable Livestock Strategy 2026 and to a broader question that will increasingly shape European agricultural policy in the years ahead: who will pay for the resilience Europe is asking its farmers to provide?

Biosecurity costs money. Surveillance costs money. Investment costs money. Maintaining effective public veterinary services costs money. Rebuilding a herd after an outbreak costs far more.

The real question, therefore, is not whether prevention has a price. It is whether the cost of prevention is lower than the cost of the next disaster.

Tchoukanov has described NAT’s role as bringing grassroots experience into European policymaking and turning dialogue into concrete recommendations.

That is where the next phase will be judged.

Europe has become highly experienced at activating mechanisms once a crisis is already in front of it. The harder task is to invest early in the things that attract less political attention: prevention, surveillance, biosecurity, land management and the economic resilience of the farmer.

The next major animal-disease outbreak, therefore, will not only show how quickly Europe can respond. It will show whether Europe prepared before it had to respond.

And that may be the most important message running through Stoyan Tchoukanov’s interventions over recent months: compensation remains necessary once a herd has been lost. But the true success of policy is to ensure that as little compensation as possible is needed in the first place.