EU Commission does not value farmers?
Well folks, it seems that all the years of protesting, lobbying and pleading with elected representatives may yet come to nought. In many ways, the EU Commission’s decision to finalise the Mercosur Trade Deal justifies what many farmers have always believed – namely, that the European Commission places precious little value on its agricultural community. While Ursula von der Leyen and co. may hail the EU-South America deal as a “win-win” for both the EU and Mercosur countries, most farmers have a far more pessimistic view of what the trade agreement will look like in practice.
A Deal to Benefit Industry?
Farmers believe, correctly in my view, that this deal was made for the benefit of industry in both economic blocks. German car manufacturers, for example, will be a big beneficiary. Having fallen far behind their Chinese and American competitors in the emerging electric vehicle market, auto giants like BMW and Audi are desperate to find new markets for their products. Regrettably, the same desperation to find new markets applies to the major beef producers of south America (especially Brazil).
Flooding the beef market?
The Mercosur deal raises the possibility that European supermarkets will be flooded with cheap Brazilian beef, undercutting European producers. And while the European Commission has tried to quell such fears among farmers, stating that a maximum of 99,000t of south American beef imports will benefit from lower tariffs under the deal, it remains to be seen how long this cap will remain in place (and how easily it can be removed once the deal has been ratified!).
IFA not giving up the fight
Naturally, all of this is making Irish beef farmers very uneasy and farm organisations are not yet ready to give up the fight. Speaking about Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to agree the trade agreement, IFA president Francie Gorman called it a “sell out deal” and reminded farmers that it still has to be ratified by the EU Council member states. “The Commision may have sold out European farmers,” Mr Gorman stated, “but there is a distance to travel yet. Essentially, we are back to where we were in 2019 with an EU Commission-agreed deal without a democratic mandate.”
The Outlook for Dairy
The European Milk Board, which represents dairy-farmer organisations across Europe, has expressed similar misgivings about the ratification of any deal with the Mercosur economic block. The organisation’s president, Kjartan Poulsen of Denmark, argued that the agreement “promotes neither social nor environmental sustainability and will only exacerbate the already difficult reality of European farmers.”
An uphill battle against industrial lobby?
The unfortunate truth is that farmers face an uphill battle if ratification of the trade deal is to be prevented. With the incoming Trump administration in the United States threatening to stamp large tariffs on European imports in 2025, EU member states will come under increasing pressure to cave to industrial lobbyists by ratifying Mercosur sooner rather than later. In such an environment as this, the year ahead promises to be an especially turbulent one for European agriculture.
