The committee of European agricultural organizations and cooperatives (Copa-Cogeca) regretted this Friday the announcement of the trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, understanding that it will have “profound consequences for family farming throughout Europe” and announced protests in Brussels next Monday.
“The fears of the farming community have been realized,” Copa-Cogeca indicated in a statement that warns that, if the Member States and the European Parliament accept the agreement, the impact will also be suffered by 450 million EU consumers.
Likewise, he announced “a lightning action in Brussels on Monday”, coinciding with a meeting of EU Agriculture and Fisheries Ministers.
The producer cooperatives recalled their “firm opposition for years” to an agreement that they describe as “obsolete and problematic”. “While we recognize the EU’s need to deepen trade relations in the current geopolitical context, this should not be done at any price,” the same statement said.
In this context, they recalled that the EU agricultural sector “remains particularly vulnerable to concessions made in the unbalanced agricultural chapter” of this agreement.
Among the sensitive sectors, it mentions beef, poultry, sugar, ethanol and rice that will face, they say, “increased risks of market saturation and loss of income due to the influx of low-cost products from the Mercosur countries”.
Furthermore, the agreement “will increase economic pressure on many farms that already face high input prices and difficult weather conditions.
The agricultural cooperatives also denounced that the Mercosur countries “operate with lower labor and safety standardsallowing them to produce at lower costs, making fair competition impossible for EU producers.”
And they criticized the “lack of coherence in the actions of the European Commission” which in the previous legislature “multiplied the restrictions and regulations for our producers” and now, “at the beginning of its second term, has prioritized this unfair agreement.”
For Copa-Cogeca, the additional protocol on sustainability sent to the Mercosur countries in March 2023 to try to resolve European concerns “did not live up to expectations” and Mercosur’s response in September 2023 “clearly demonstrated a lack of ambition and commitment to uphold even core international conventions and binding sustainability measures.”
The president of Copa, Massimiliano Giansanti, considered that with this step taken today “the Commission has sent a very worrying message to millions of farmers throughout Europe”, something that he considered even more worrying in the recently released “reopening the dialogue between farmers and the European institutions.”
“Member States and MEPs must now strongly question the terms of this agreement and work to find a solution that guarantees a fair and balanced approach to protect the EU agricultural model”, he added.
He announced that, starting next Monday, the producers will go “into action, exchanging points of view with ministers and MEPs as we launch lightning action in Brussels”.
From the European Coordination Via Campesina (small and medium farmers), they condemned the decision of the European Commission and the Mercosur leaders to conclude the negotiations, and assured that the peasants will continue to mobilize against the trade agreement “and, in one way or another , will put an end to it.”
In a statement, they also pointed out that the pact between the EU and Mercosur “totally contradicts the commitments of all the national governments of these blocs in the fight against climate change”.
“We will now look closely at what the governments and political groups that during the historic farmers’ mobilization earlier this year claimed to be close to the farmers will actually do. They have to position against the treaty and this undemocratic way of negotiating trade agreements”, said Andoni García, from the European Coordination Via Campesina.
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