Farmers in Europe launch protests over Mercosur trade deal

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By Sybille de La Hamaide

PARIS (Reuters) -European farmers protested in Brussels on Wednesday against the EU-Mercosur free trade deal with South American countries, with farmers in neighbouring France saying they would follow suit from early next week.

Brazil has been pushing to have the EU-Mercosur agreement signed by the end of the month while it holds the presidency of the G20. Advocates of the deal, including the EU’s biggest economy Germany, say it will open up more markets for their exports.

Meanwhile France, the EU’s largest agriculture producer, has been trying to convince other EU members to form a minority bloc against the deal.

French Prime Minister Michel Barnier said after meeting EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels: “I told the president that France cannot and will not accept this deal under its current terms.”

Farmers say the agreement with the Mercosur bloc that includes Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay will create unfair competition for EU farmers and food makers as it will allow large imports of products that are not bound by the same strict regulation they face in the EU.

About 100 farmers gathered near the EU headquarters with one tractor carrying a banner saying “STOP EU-Mercosur”, and saying the deal would be bad for the environment and social rights.

Their placards included ones saying “We demand fair prices now” and a dummy hanging from a tractor had a sign reading “Killed by European politicians”.

“… for decades we’ve been fighting against the free trade agreement, based on competition and really not providing fair prices for farmers,” said Edu H. Nualart, a Spanish farmer now living in the Netherlands, who joined the protest.

In France, farmers are planning protests around the country on Monday and Tuesday, when G20 leaders will be meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Arnaud Rousseau, chairman of France’s largest farm union FNSEA told reporters.

“If we were to validate this agreement, it would be a real disaster for European and French agriculture, with production conditions that obviously don’t respect any of our production standards,” Rousseau said. 

Some farmers started small protests on Wednesday, dumping manure in the eastern town of Chaumont.

Weather-hit harvests and outbreaks of livestock disease along with political deadlock after a snap election at the start of summer have added to the grievances of French farmers.

“As it stands this agreement jeopardises fair trade and the future of millions of French producers and the agri-food chain that depends on them,” Jean-François Guihard, head of livestock and meat association Interbev, told reporters on Wednesday.

The EU-Mercosur deal would allow the entry of an additional 99,000 tons of beef, 190,000 tons of sugar, 180,000 tons poultry meat, 1 million tons of maize, the producers said.

Farmers do not intend to block highways as they had done in large-scale protests last year, Rousseau said.

(Reporting by Sybille de La Hamaide, additional reporting by Phil Blenkinsop in Brussels and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris, Editing by Louise Heavens, Angus MacSwan and Alison Williams)