Comparing the role of ‘security’ in EU energy and agri‐food law

Abstract In EU energy and agri‐food law, ‘security’ is constantly invoked to justify legal action and to guide the adoption and interpretation of law. This article compares the concepts of energy security and food security, focusing on their relationship to sustainability, and asks whether invoking security enables or obstructs each sector's environmental transformation. It argues that EU energy law has integrated sustainability into the concept of energy security itself, whereas agri‐food law treats sustainability as separate from—and, in times of crisis, in tension with—food security. Two case studies illustrate the implications: in the wake of Russia's war against Ukraine since February 2022, invoking security accelerated the clean energy transition but triggered a backlash against agri‐environmental measures; the 2026 US–Israeli war against Iran largely reproduced this divergence, although the EU's response to the resulting fertiliser crisis shows early signs of convergence between food security and sustainability. Four structural elements explain these profoundly divergent effects of a seemingly similar concept: the sectors' factual situations and historical evolutions, their regulatory rationales, the temporal dimension of security and agricultural exceptionalism. The article concludes that long‐term food security requires integrating sustainability into the legal concept of food security itself.