Fed-up farmers: Poland and Spain join protests as Copa-Cogeca demands answers from EU Commission

01 Feb 2024 --- As farmers and agricultural communities continue to face crippling economic pressures, protests are mounting around Europe as communities push back against a swathe of government policies. And now, Copa-Cogeca, the EU’s “united voice of farmers,” has issued a stark warning for stakeholders to “listen more” while making several key recommendations to ease tensions.

Copa-Cogeca says there is an urgent need to provide short-term answers to the questions posed by the thousands of farmers who have consistently demonstrated concerns over their future livelihoods as governments introduce policies to mitigate climate change impacts. 

The warning comes as the wave of farmer demonstrations around Europe grows, now including Poland, Spain and Belgium.

Polish farmer protests
In recent days, Polish farmers have been some of the latest to take to the streets in alliance with farmers from France and Germany, where frustrated groups have been intermittently blockading roads for some time.

In Poland, farmers on tractors demonstrated against the European Green Deal, EU policies that hurt local agriculture and the influx of Ukrainian food. They want to prevent Ukrainian food from flooding the Polish market and see the EU reinstate trading restrictions. 

It has been suggested by some farmers that EU policies are negatively impacting local agriculture.Yesterday, Belgians blocked highways and roads close to a key container port, while farmers in Spain are reportedly preparing to protest. The country’s three main farmers’ unions announced yesterday that they will begin nationwide protests next week.

Spanish farmers say “suffocating EU bureaucracy” is pushing farmers to their limits and want to see a review of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). 

Farmer concerns accumulate
In an open letter to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, Copa-Cogeca urges that “we must listen to the echoes that are reverberating throughout our countryside from the West to the East of Europe. Farming communities are facing enormous challenges and pressures, which have only accumulated in recent years.”

“Economic burdens and bureaucracy are strangling farmers across the EU. The effects of climatic and geopolitical crises are impacting our farms considerably. And all this with the feeling that more constraints and more European regulations are going to be imposed on farms with severe and irreversible consequences on productions, income and increase of imports with less environmental and social standards.”

“The situation is currently very tense in many member states, with farmers taking to the streets, as the survival of European family farming as it is known today, is in danger.”

Copa-Cogeca wants explicitly the EC to finally decide on the much-needed derogations to the CAP and to adapt to the next Ukraine Autonomous Trade Measures proposal. This means creating a system ensuring that the destination for all consignments of Ukrainian agricultural products is determined prior to entry into the EU and introducing a system to guarantee that the Ukrainian products reach this final destination and do not end up elsewhere.

They also demand the introduction of import thresholds for any agricultural commodity subject to trade liberalization based on the yearly or quarterly average for the combined years 2021 and 2022. 

Finally, the agriculture organization describes the Mercosur agreement as being “unacceptable for most EU farmers at this moment,” and a continuous push for getting the deal across the line will be perceived as “a further provocation by the farming community and will increase the rejection for decisions taken by the European Commission.”

The planned Mercosur deal involves Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay and will eliminate 93% of tariffs to the EU while allowing increased access to the European market for Mercosur’s agricultural goods, notably beef, poultry, sugar and ethanol. 

It has caused some controversy since first being announced in 2019. However, the definitive texts have not been finalized, signed, or ratified and, therefore, have not entered into force. If ratified, it would represent the largest trade agreement the EU and Mercosur reached in terms of citizens involved.

By Gaynor Selby