Ekologisk hållbarhet, småjordbrukare och EU. : En analys av Europeiska kommissionens förslag till nytt frödirektiv

Sammanfattning: The European Commission has presented a new seed directive that better matches the EU's sustainability goals, The Green Deal. However, the EU's common agricultural policy is based on an idea which means that it is mainly large-scale agriculture that benefits from the technological development that the proposal entails. In the periphery there are small-scale farmers whose opinions are rarely considered. The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects that a change in the EU's current seed directive could potentially have on the farmer's ecological health and, in connection with this, the future of smallholder farmers. Finally, the study shows that the EU's proposal for a new seed directive can be understood in accordance with Dryzek's description of the two currently dominant environmental discourses, "sustainability" and "ecological modernization", which are also linked to both small farmers' economic and ecological future. • How does the new Seeds Directive want to increase the EU's agricultural sustainability? What are its concrete proposals? • What ecological effects can come from the new seed directive? • What effects will the different alternatives in the bill have on large and small farmers, respectively? • Which of Dryzek's discourses “ecological modernization” and “sustainability” is most in line with the various alternatives, and what are the implications for the long-term sustainability of agriculture?The study was carried out through a content analysis on the European Commission's proposal and on the report of the consulting firm Inner City Fund (ICF) on which the Commission based its decision. Subsequently, a problematizing dimension, a type of discourse analysis, was applied to examine which discourse is most dominant in the EU proposal and what this dominance means for both the farmer's ecological health and the small farmer's interests and needs.The results indicate that the proposal will to a large extent benefit large-scale agriculture and that there are few interests in meeting the needs of small farmers. The results also indicate that ecological modernization is the most dominant discourse in the proposal, which opens the proposal to the criticism that has also been delivered against ecological modernization as a sustainability discourse.