While EU leaders were negotiating the revision of the EU’s multiannual budget framework, a large farmers’ protest took place outside the European Parliament in Brussels. At least a thousand tractors entered the capital of Belgium on Thursday, and several thousand people gathered in front of the European Parliament. Farmers, among others from Belgium and Italy demanded that EU regulations imposing restrictive requirements on their farms be thrown out.
-We are here to defend our agriculture. We have been trying to draw the attention of the Belgian government to our problems for three years without success. We must finally come to our senses and fight together with the whole of Europe for a common cause: for us and our children to be able to pursue the profession of farmer, Isabel Proost, a farmer from Flanders, told PAP.
-The Brussels elites want us to disappear. EU regulations, under the guise of environmental protection, impose restrictive standards on us that we cannot meet. Additionally, imports from Ukraine and other non-European countries put price pressure on us. This is unfair competition, she added.
First your own, then import
This was echoed by Enrico Nada, a representative of the Italian farmers’ organization Coldiretti: “There are about a thousand of us here. We came from all over Italy. We are defending the future of agriculture here. We want clear and fair rules. We want to be able to use all available agricultural land that we have at our disposal. We must first use opportunities that we have in Europe, and only then think about importing. Sacrificing our own production and opening the door wide to production from around the world is not a good path. We have an incredible diversity of agricultural production in Europe, so we should first use our own potential and possibly open the doors later for others if necessary.”
Jose Maria Castilla from the Spanish association of young farmers (ASAJA) demands the suspension of EU regulations introduced after 2019.
-We cannot accept new regulations until the import issue is sorted out. It is unfair that Italian, Portuguese and Spanish farmers have to compete with products that do not meet phytosanitary standards and come from countries where there is no law guaranteeing respect for human rights – as is happening in Morocco, he said, adding that farmers they cannot work normally without legal predictability. – It cannot be that the law changes every 2-3 years – he emphasized.
Law detached from reality
According to Duarte Mira from the Confederation of Portuguese Farmers (CAP), EU agricultural policy is detached from reality.
-The entire European Commission policy that was launched in 2019 does not take into account the war in Ukraine or the Covid-19 pandemic. We are dealing with an agricultural policy that is completely unadapted to the realities and harms farmers, concluded the Portuguese. (PAP)
