EU agricultural plan waters down environmental commitment

BrusselsThe anti-environmental wave sweeping through Europe has reached Brussels. The European Commission presented this Wednesday the main lines of the plan for agriculture and livestock farming and, with the aim of promoting the sector, it reduces the ecological commitments of those who He had made such a show of it in the previous legislature. In this way, after the mass protests of the peasantry In a statement issued by the European Commission, the EU executive now "recognises" that it is necessary to "reconcile climate action" with the "challenges" faced by agricultural and livestock farms.

Among other measures, the EU executive promises that from now on it will "carefully study" any new ban on the use of a type of pesticide. And, if farmers do not have an "alternative" product available to them within a "reasonable period of time", it will avoid vetoing it. However, the European Commission assures that this will not affect the food safety of the final consumer nor does it mean a step backwards in its fight against climate change. In this sense, it highlights that it will "accelerate" the access of the primary sector of the European Union to biopesticides.

At the press conference, the Commissioner for Agriculture, Christophe Hansen, has vehemently defended that Brussels maintains the climate objectives. However, he admitted that the European Commission will change its strategy to achieve them and will henceforth "act with incentives instead of imposing restrictions." In fact, the head of Community Agriculture has explained that a "voluntary" system will be created to help farmers apply sustainability measures that the EU wants to promote. "It will work much better," Hansen insisted.

Another of the main measures of this plan directly affects the common agricultural policy (CAP), which accounts for nearly a third of the total budget of the European Union. As agreed by the community bloc in the previous legislature, Brussels promises that it will continue working to reduce the paperwork that farmers must face in order to benefit from community subsidies. This means, among other things, that the European Commission will carry out fewer controls on small and medium-sized farmers and ranchers to ensure that they comply with environmental regulations.

More controls on imports

In the midst of controversy over Mercosur free trade agreement, the Vice-President of the European Commission, Raffaele Fitto, has pledged to "strengthen" controls on products imported into the European market and has announced that this year he will take measures to "ensure greater coherence" between the standards that European farmers must meet and those outside the community bloc. And, as requested by the European primary sector, these controls will focus especially on meat from cattle imported, for example, from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay or Brazil.

On the other hand, the new Commissioner for Agriculture described the distribution of subsidies under the current CAP as "unfair" and criticised the fact that 80% of these European funds end up in the hands of 20% of the companies in the sector, which are mainly large multinationals and farms. However, it must be remembered that the main objective of the creation of the CAP is exactly the opposite, to help small and medium-sized farmers. And, for this reason, Hansen has promised that he will work to avoid "simple payments per hectare" and to take more into account the "needs of each agricultural holding".