Phil Hogan emerges as front-runner in EU race for world’s biggest food agency

In 2020, Phil Hogan resigned from the European Commission after attending a parliamentary event that flouted Ireland’s Covid lockdown. Today, he is the front-runner to become the European Union’s candidate to lead the world’s biggest food agency.

The job is that of director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. body that writes the global rules for food safety, sounds the alarm over looming famines, decides which fish stocks are sustainable and sets the standards for how forests get cut down. It has a staff of 15,000, a $1 billion budget and its head gets four years to shape the global food agenda.

The last European to head the FAO, Dutchman Addeke Boerma, stepped down in 1975. China’s Qu Dongyu, the term-limited incumbent, has run the agency since 2019, filling key posts with Chinese nationals and steering the agenda in directions that have alarmed Western donors. 

With the role up for grabs in 2027, the EU wants it back. While the bloc’s 27 governments agree they are better off rallying behind one name as a split could hand the job to an outsider, the problem is who to pick. Three of its members have entered candidates of their own: Ireland’s Hogan; Luis Planas, Spain’s agriculture minister; and Italy’s Maurizio Martina.

Each country wants its candidate in the job and no one is prepared to stand aside. Hogan is the closest thing to a front-runner. But winning the EU race is just the first step, as he would still have to win a secret ballot of 193 U.N. member countries next summer.

With the vote a year away, candidates are already courting support globally through travel, promises and the direct lobbying of the agriculture ministers and diplomats who will get to decide.

Irishman’s self-made bid

Hogan, 65, saw the opportunity before anyone else. Last fall, before Spain or Italy had named a candidate, he was already in Rome, working the corridors of the FAO headquarters and sounding out diplomats who would take part in the vote.

He hasn’t stopped since. This month, he turned up in Tajikistan for a regional conference, and he has also campaigned in Brazil and Mauritania. Last week, he was back home in Ireland, pitching what he called a “new FAO for a new world” at an agricultural conference.

By most accounts in Brussels and Rome, the strategy is working, and Hogan is now the man to beat, despite a record that would sink most candidates.

He resigned from the Commission in 2020, after serving as agriculture and then trade chief, over a Covid-era golf dinner that violated public health rules and triggered a political storm. He holds no government office and has spent the years since his time working for the EU advising multinational corporations. As for his campaign, he has his own PR team and is bankrolling at least part of it out of his own pocket.

But the Irish government was not completely convinced. Internal documents published by the Irish Times this month showed officials questioning what benefit the state would derive from his FAO candidacy.

But Hogan has managed to pick up support in other quarters. Paris became the first major capital to back him and EU diplomats say his Irish passport could help open doors in Washington, although no U.S. endorsement has come yet.

Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez signs a guest book next to FAO director-general Qu Dongyu and Spain’s agriculture minister Luis Planas on May 26, 2026. | Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images

His biggest advantage, however, is his politics. Of the three candidates, only Hogan is aligned with the European People’s Party, the center-right bloc that dominates most EU capitals. Planas and Martina are socialists. 

When Finland’s Agriculture Minister Sari Essayah was asked whether Helsinki had a favorite, she declined to name one, but offered a hint. “Of course, I’m sure that coming from an EPP-led country, you can guess who would be the Finnish favorite,” she told POLITICO.

Spain’s two-job problem

The biggest liability of Hogan’s Spanish rival could be the Irishman’s most important leverage.

There are three U.N. food agencies headquartered in Rome: the FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Program. The unofficial choreography of multilateral rotation says no single country should run all three.

Spain already runs one, although economist Alvaro Lario, the IFAD president, is up for re-election in February. The Trump administration’s pick for the WFP, Luke Lindberg, is expected to take over next year.

Latin American capitals have told both Europe and Washington that three OECD countries running the three Rome agencies is a non-starter, meaning they wouldn’t support two Spaniards in key roles. That could rule Planas out, or it could mean Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has to sacrifice one top job to secure another.

On Tuesday, Sánchez signaled he intends to do neither. From a U.N. stage in Rome, with incumbent Qu seated beside him, he told the audience he wants his men in both slots.

Sánchez’s keynote was either a bet that the objection would yield to political will or a bluff. Diplomats describe IFAD as the chip Spain could ultimately trade to install Planas at FAO.

Planas, 73, has been Spain’s agriculture minister since 2018 and survived three governments. He is running the best-resourced campaign of the three EU contenders. In late April, he toured Rome with Sánchez’s diplomatic advisers, with a glossy brochure pitching “experienced leadership for a stronger FAO.” He also had back-to-back meetings with Latin American and European ambassadors at the Spanish embassy on Rome’s Janiculum Hill.

None of it has solved the underlying problem: The most professional campaign in the race is also the one boxed in by the rotation rule.

Italy’s absent candidate

Martina, 47, cannot openly campaign because he already works inside the building. He has been the FAO’s deputy director-general since 2021 and lobbying for the top job while serving in that role would put him in an awkward spot.

Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government nominated him in February. Italy wanted one of the three Rome jobs and Martina, a former secretary-general of the center-left Democratic Party, was already there.

Maurizio Martina, deputy director-general of the FAO, pictured in Naples, Italy, on March 17, 2023. | Ivan Romano/Getty Images

Meloni tapped Stefania Rosini, a former ambassador to Denmark with no prior U.N. experience, to run his bid. Diplomats say the campaign has barely got off the ground.

What Italy has instead is leverage of a narrower kind. It hosts all three agencies and it could undermine any deal that leaves it empty handed. Italy expects something, whether the FAO job, a deputy post or a prize elsewhere in the system. 

Sánchez and Meloni had been expected to meet in Rome this week, but the meeting fell through. There is, as one diplomat put it, “no love left” between them.

Hogan, Planas and Martina did not respond to requests for comment.

The danger of dithering

The EU’s agriculture ministers tried to settle which of the three should represent the bloc, but couldn’t agree. For six months, Cyprus, which has chaired the meetings, pressed them to coalesce around one name, but Cypriot Agriculture Minister Maria Panayiotou told POLITICO that no decision had been made on how to move it forward.

The choice will now be made by EU leaders, possibly folded into a broader deal over other top international posts. That pushes any decision to a European Council summit, with the FAO race playing only a small part in the late-night horse-trading.

The risk is that the deadlock holds and the EU enters the 2027 vote divided.

“The most important thing is to pick one from these candidates,” Polish Agriculture Minister Stefan Krajewski told POLITICO. “Because otherwise, we may lose, and a candidate from outside the EU could win.”

Three African contenders are already in the field, including Morocco’s Ismahane Elouafi, the FAO’s former chief scientist, who left after a falling out with Qu. Turkey’s candidate, Mehmet Mehdi Eker, was nominated early by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and is seen as a dark horse if the European vote fragments.

But for now, the EU is still holding its primary.