Abandonment of environmental standards in the EU in the agricultural sector: the most ‘damaged’ will paradoxically be the farmers themselves, although they don’t know it yet. Members of the European Parliament decide whether to vote on the European Commission’s plan that eliminates many of the environmental requirements that must comply with farmers to obtain EU funds
Greenpeace warns that water scarcity or contamination, soil depletion, loss of biodiversity and the acceleration of climate change affect the ability to produce food.
Making visible that the reduction of nature protection harms farmers, since the scarcity or contamination of water, the depletion of soils, the loss of biodiversity and the acceleration of climate change affect the ability to produce food.
In recent months, farmers have protested the unsustainability of their income, since they are harmed by the prices of more industrial producers outside Europe and pressured by powerful food companies that force prices down. Greenpeace warns that Politicians are making nature protection rules the scapegoat for a problem caused by market forces and trade policy.
Farmers are rightly angry: small and medium-sized farms are disappearing, swallowed up by mega farms, as farmers are caught between cheap imports from outside the EU and unfair prices imposed by the big market players.
European politicians, unwilling to review the EU’s unsustainable trade policy or stand up to the bullies of food corporations and chemical companies, pretend that the problem is the protection of nature on farms. Removing the last environmental protections is a poisoned gift for farmers, which will condemn them to worse droughts, floods and failed harvests, without doing anything to resolve their precarious economic situation, said Greenpeace Europe Agricultural Policy Director Marco Contiero.
Spanish farmers, greatly affected by the abandonment of environmental standards in the EU
In response to farmers’ protests, the European Commission has proposed relaxing many of the environmental requirements of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. The Agriculture Ministers have already indicated that EU governments will support these plans to cut nature protection in agricultural regulations. The vote in the European Parliament will decide whether to accelerate the European Parliament’s response to this proposal, skipping debates and votes in parliamentary committees and immediately putting it to a vote in the last plenary session before the June elections.
“Instead of improving technical and economic support to implement these practices that are so necessary to fight desertification in Spain, Europe has chosen to take steps back in the protection of farmers and nature. In a country like Spain, where 75% of our territory is at risk of desertification, these practices that want to make more flexible, such as plant covers in sensitive periods, crop rotation or fallow, would allow us to recover the structure, humidity and soil fertility and avoid erosion. “What would be a safeguard for agriculture is being eliminated, not only in the short, but in the medium and long term,” declared Helena Moreno, head of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at Greenpeace.
If the European Parliament votes in favor of accelerating the proposal to relax environmental requirements for farmers, the next vote on the content of the Commission’s proposal will be at its last plenary session on April 22-25.