Offaly based Independent Carol Nolan has said she has written to the outgoing Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue and the outgoing Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Peter Burke, calling on them to express the Irish government’s unequivocal opposition to any EU Commission attempt to force through aspects of Latin America’s Mercosur bloc trade deal that would entail the bypassing of EU national parliaments.
The move follows reports that the European Commission and Mercosur countries are manoeuvring to conclude negotiations on a trade accord at a summit of the Latin American bloc in early December.
Depuy Nolan told Gript: “Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have the nerve to tour our marts and farming organisations with promises in both hands while they conceal a poisonous trade policy in their pockets. Mercosur will crush Irish beef farming. It will flood our markets with sub-par products and it will wipe out domestic growth potential for quality Irish beef.”
Irish farmers and farming representative organisations have vehemently opposed the deal which they say will see the country flooded with tens of thousands of tonnes of poor-quality beef.
“We need to remind people that at the national level, suckler farmers play a key role in generating more than €2.4 billion in beef exports each year and anything that undermines that simply cannot be tolerated,” said Deputy Nolan.
“At the local level, the point has been also well made that for every €1 we provide to suckler farmers, more than €4 of economic activity is generated in local economies.”
“This clearly demonstrates the potential damage that this awful trade deal will bring about if it is not effectively challenged.”
“We must also face the clear fact that such a move by the EU Commission would diminish us all by embedding anti-democratic trade measures in to a system that already has appalling democratic deficits in place.”
“This is the time for the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael to put up or shut up when it comes to protecting farm incomes. They cannot have it both ways,” Deputy Nolan concluded.
Gript reported from Brussels last week that:
Years of assurances by the Irish government to cattle farmers could shortly be blown out of the water as senior EU figures insisted this week that the bloc was fast-tracking the signing of the Mercosur trade deal with Latin America despite a wave of agrarian discontent.
Media reports describe how European Commission officials met in secret in Brussels throughout this week as political insiders described how Eurocrats intend to finalise the deal in early December at a summit in Uruguay.
The Mercosur deal, which has been in the works for over twenty years before picking up steam in the late 2010s, envisions the dropping of 90% of tariffs between the EU bloc, including Ireland, and Brazil – allowing greater market access between the two continents under a shared regulatory framework.
The Irish government has so far taken an ambiguous stance on the deal as farmers took to the media this week to outline the risk that cheap imports pose to what is essentially a healthy industry already feeling the regulatory impact of strict nitrate quotas.
Pointing to environmental concerns in the Amazon, political turmoil within Latin America, and oversupply fears from European farmers, the deal has repeatedly been rejected by Irish farming groups such as the IFA, which warned about the impact of cut-price Brazilian imports on Irish market dominance.
Arguing that EU and Irish government participation in Mercosur fundamentally discredits the supposedly green credentials of both entities, President of the ICMSA dairy association Denis Drennan outlined that Brussels is open about the damage the deal will do to Irish industry.
“On one hand, the EU wants to load more regulation on its own farmers in the name of sustainability and on the other, it appears happy to conclude a deal that will see lower-standard beef enter the EU market with little regard for the environment,” he said.