ECVC farmers at EU Agri-Food Days: Generational renewal and fair prices are incompatible with EU-Mercosur FTA

The European Commission has proved itself unwilling to implement these priorities when it comes to EU trade policy. Despite the special status of food as a human right, farmers and agriculture are being used as a bargaining chip within multisectoral free trade agreements, sacrificed for the benefit of other interests and actors.

In particular, to address generational renewal the Commission must move away from its competition narrative to tackle key obstacles for young and aspiring farmers today, including access to land to start farming activity and the possibility to earn decent living from farming. Yet, the Commission’s position on the EU-Mercosur FTA goes entirely in the opposite direction.

As Paola Laini, who is responsible for the ECVC Youth Articulation, underlines: “Competition cannot be an unquestioned priority in EU agri-policy if we are to achieve generational renewal in the sector. We need long-term access to land and rural territories, and we need more and smaller agroecological farms in which young farmers can earn a decent living and have fair working conditions. Including agriculture in multisectoral FTAs ignores all this and means young farmers continue to pay the price while multinationals get richer. The time has come to remove agriculture from such kinds of FTAs and embed it in a new trade framework based on people's food sovereignty and solidarity between farmers.”

Furthermore, the Commission will address the key topic of fair prices for farmers this week by tabling ‘targeted amendments’ to the Common Market Organisation (CMO) and the proposal to strengthen the enforcement of Unfair Trading Practices (UTP) Directive, to give it a cross-border dimension. ECVC will closely analyse the proposal in the coming days to assess its appropriateness to regulate markets and ensure a ban on purchasing agricultural produce under the cost of production. However, it is not appropriate that these amendments be used as a way to distract from the damage the EU-Mercosur FTA will do to farmers' incomes.

As Laurence Marandola, spokesperson for Confederation paysanne and ECVC representative at the Agri-Food Days underlines, “The EU-Mercosur FTA will further lower farmers income, and farmers are already struggling to survive. We need market regulation and trade based on food sovereignty and the institutions must address EU trade policy as a root cause of farmers’ low incomes and the lack of generational renewal.”

Read ECVC’s full recommendations on the Action Plan for Generational Renewal
Read ECVC’s recommendations for the CMO /a> and UTP Directive