Farmers in the EU have protested on many occasions over unfair foreign competition and the viability of their businesses. They gathered again in Brussels on December 18, while an EU summit was going on, this time focusing their ire on the Mercosur free trade agreement between the EU and Latin American countries. We speak to Elli Tsiforou, the Secretary-General of COPA-COGECA, the umbrella organisation of farmers and agri-cooperatives in the EU.

Tsiforou explains why farmers are so worried about this type of free trade agreement. "In every commercial agreement, there are opportunities and there are losses," she says. "Our question when it comes to Mercosur is more strategic. And the strategic question has to do with the divergence of standards. in the Mercosur deal, we see that the gap between EU standards and the standards that are practically not applying in those countries is enormous. And this is something that we cannot accept."

Tsiforou elaborates: "Any sector could fall into this, in future trade deals, if the European Commission doesn't have a strategic appreciation of our sector when it comes to striking trade deals."

But don't the safeguards that MEPs voted to strengthen in the EU Parliament provide a safety net? "Despite the sincere efforts of the members of the Parliament to improve [the safeguards], they cannot provide sufficient guarantees for us," Tsiforou answers. "You cannot address the standards question through a defensive mechanism. The Mercosur countries need to commit to the same [standards] as we have in Europe. And this is not addressed by the safeguards."

Tsiforou is also not impressed by the EU Commission's talk of streamlining and improving help to farmers in the next long-term EU budget.

"We see that the proposals of the Commission for the future policy after 2028 not only introduce important budgetary cuts, so 20 percent, without counting the impact of inflation, but they also radically change the structure of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)," Tsiforou states. "So there we see a clear danger of renationalisation of the only common policy we have in the EU, the CAP, which is one of the pillars of the EU construction as a whole. So this renationalisation risks ending up with 27 agricultural policies across the EU, and a severe impact on the internal market and on the functioning of the food chain, and also on rural areas."

We ask Tsiforou if the EU's simplification agenda – reducing bureaucracy on farmers, among many sectors – is bearing fruit. "Currently? Not at all," Tsiforou replies. "I think that we are reaching a peak in terms of the burden that is experienced by farmers. There is a big chunk of EU legislation that is weighing on EU farms, that farmers need to implement. But the rules either contradict themselves, or are not pragmatic and block farmers from producing, or block them in their efforts to go towards the sustainable transition. The Commission has committed to a thorough and authentic simplification. But we see a lack of ambition there. We just had the Environment Omnibus simplification proposals, and we saw that there were very few elements that address our concrete concerns when it comes to simplification."

Programme prepared by Isabelle Romero, Oihana Almandoz and Perrine Desplats