EU’s global push on food sustainability standards raises hackles in third countries

The EU’s ambition to hold third countries’ food imports to its own sustainability standards has been met with consternation as stakeholders sounded the alarm in key trading partners, including Brazil and the US.

As set out in the EU’s flagship food policy, the Farm to Fork strategy, EU trade policy should “contribute to enhance cooperation with and to obtain ambitious commitments from third countries in key areas”.

This includes key areas such as animal welfare, the use of pesticides, and the fight against antimicrobial resistance in efforts to “encourage the production of agri-food products complying with high safety and sustainability standards”. 

And there has been a recent spate of legislation intended to make this a reality, including a new deforestation law, as well as conversations over halting the export of banned pesticides from the EU and calls to apply animal welfare rules to imported products.

The move has been welcomed both by EU farmers, who stress the need for a level playing field, as well as green campaigners, who point out concerns that otherwise this may lead to an outsourcing of the EU’s pollution elsewhere.

But the EU’s push on sustainability has sparked concern in third countries, including the likes of Brazil and the US. 

Stricter animal welfare rules should apply to imports, EU ministers say

If the EU raises the bar on animal welfare for livestock farmed within the bloc, equivalent rules must be applied to imported products to keep domestic producers competitive, several national ministers have warned.

“The European Commission is asking more and more from other countries outside of Europe to do certain things of which, if you go there, you see that that’s a stupid question,” Jurgen Tack, scientific director at the European Landowners’ Organisation (ELO) said during a recent event in Brussels focused on driving forward sustainable food production across Brazil and Europe.

This is because “either it’s impossible to do so, or there is no need to do so,” Tack explained, adding that, while North-South knowledge exchange is important, the North has ‘a lot to learn’ from the South. 

“We have a certain vision in Europe about Brazilian agriculture and its scale, but what we have learned over there is quite the opposite,” he said, adding that this is something that is  “very difficult to bring to Europe to explain in a European context”.

Likewise, Vinícius Guimarães from the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), stressed the uniqueness of tropical growing conditions.

“Conditions are different, and so the use of different products and inputs is necessary because of that,” he explained.  

According to him, the answer instead lies in investing in international partnerships

“We are trying to make the best partnership with North-South cooperation, and also to help our partners with South-South cooperation,” he said, stressing that this is the best way to develop solutions. 

Commission to consider halting export of banned pesticides, EU source says

The European Commission will look to ensure that hazardous chemicals, such as pesticides, banned in the European Union are not produced for export, including by “amending relevant legislation if and as needed”, an EU source has confirmed to EURACTIV.

Likewise, tensions over the EU’s vision for a greener future are also mounting in the US. 

“If you feel that is right for Europe, go ahead – but don’t impose it on the rest of the world where we’re focused on finding and growing the proteins to feed the world,” Ted McKinney, chief executive of the US association of state departments of agriculture (NASDA), told an event on transatlantic relations on 5 December.

For McKinney, the EU and the US are “certainly on opposite ends of this whole thing”. 

“This is going to boil to a head, and it’s not going to be pretty,” he warned.

However, the director for international affairs at the European Commission’s agriculture service (DG AGRI), John Clarke, defended the EU’s position, arguing that it has ‘no choice’ but to move towards more sustainable agriculture.

“We really have no alternative to reducing harmful pesticide use, reducing residue limits,” he said, citing environmental and health reasons and stressing the need to move towards more organic production which is much “more kind on environment and climate”.

“If we don’t move in this direction, we’re going to be completely wrecked in the long term,” he warned, maintaining that the EU’s approach is “perfectly legitimate, based on science and not protectionist or discriminatory”. 

While Clarke stated that open trade ‘tends to be conducive to sustainability’, he warned it is “not automatic”.

As such, “countries who are trading and producing need to put in place explicit deliberate policies to make their production more sustainable,” he concluded.

[Edited by Gerardo Fortuna/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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