ECVC joins the Farmers Unite campaign to stop EU-Mercosur FTA

Farmers across the board are opposed to this deal and the irreversible damage it will do to European agriculture and food systems. This was made clear in last year’s protests, with clear calls to reject the EU-Mercosur FTA being a core demand of those who took to the streets.

For farmers, it is clear; the EU-Mercosur trade deal will:

• Attack farmers’ livelihoods, exacerbating their currently struggles to earn a decent living and flooding the market with additional cheaper imports. Agribusiness will exploit the differences in production costs in the EU and Mercosur countries to squeeze more profit out of farmers, driving down their prices down and forcing them out of business.

• Create an even more unstable food production system, forcing farmers to produce food as cheaply as possible in a way that prevents them from adopting more sustainable practices. It will stretch the food production chain across continents, increasing dependencies that make the whole system more vulnerable, despite Europe needing to produce food more locally in order to be resilient to shocks from extreme climate events, geopolitical conflict or other unforeseeable circumstances.

• Abandon farmers for agribusiness and other industries, despite the fact that agriculture is a critical and unique sector. If farmers lose, then society loses, but profits for other industries are being put above feeding people. The FTA uses farmers as a bargaining chip, allowing exploitative practices of big agri companies to grow, and the disastrous consequences for farmers will also be passed on to citizens and the planet, while others line their pockets.

The impact of the EU-Mercosur trade agreement will also affect certain sectors, member states and local industries differently, exacerbating differences between EU farmers. For ECVC and its members, it is clear that imported agricultural products will arrive at specific times and places, successively pushing some certain out of business because they face an unfair competition in a critical period (e.g. during harvest). Despite all the promises made by Ursula von der Leyen in her strategic dialogue and by Christophe Hansen to listen to and support the farmers who need it most, the Commission are only serving to make the realities of farmers in Europe more difficult, “without taking the diversity of agriculture into account in its impact assessment.”

The false promises of the European Commission will not protect us, nor will additional illusory safeguard mechanisms which in the past have proven incapable of preventing crises even when said crises were highly predictable. We need to stop EU-Mercosur to survive. If we lose our farmers, we leave agriculture at the mercy of corporate greed.

Get involved: Farmers and agricultural workers across Europe can participate in the campaign at farmersunite.eu and use the comms kit in different languages to spread the word.