Copa-Cogeca, the influential EU farmers’ lobby, has said that the EU’s concessions to Canberra in the recently signed trade agreement with Australia are “unacceptable” because they do not provide sufficient protection for European farmers, euronews writes.
“In the post-MERCOSUR deal environment, the cumulative impact of successive trade agreements makes these concessions unacceptable,” the lobby said, adding that “European farmers cannot continue to bear the costs of bilateral trade liberalization without adequate and truly effective safeguards.”
The EU-Australia agreement sets quotas for important products such as beef (30,600 tons per year, phased over 10 years), sheep meat (25,000 tons per year over seven years), sugar (35,000 tons) and rice (8,500 tons, phased over five years).
However, Copa-Cogeca warned that these figures are added to quotas already allocated to Mercosur countries – Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay – including 99,000 tons for beef and existing sugar quotas with Brazil and Paraguay.
The European Commission has included a safeguard mechanism allowing the EU and Australia to impose temporary measures for the first seven years if a sudden increase in imports causes serious market disruption in one of the partners.
However, the lobby characterized the measures as mere “communication tools,” with one spokesperson telling Euronews that “they will be slowly activated if there is a market crisis.”
