Farmers’ organisations from the European Milk Board (EMB) and European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) descended on Liège Airport in Belgium on Wednesday (December 17) to express their anger at EU policies related to agriculture and the EU-Mercosur trade deal.

Farmers from MIG, AbL, FUGEA, Boerenforum, and La Confédération Paysanne gathered at the hub for international trade to communicate their disapproval of the EU-Mercosur deal and to call for a strong Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with a budget to guarantee farmers a decent income.

Philippe Duvivier, president of FUGEA (Wallonia), said: “The EU-Mercosur treaty is symbolic of an unfair and dangerous trade policy, where our farmers are forced to compete with models that do not respect our social, environmental and health standards.

"This unfair competition weakens our farms and our ability to produce local food, which is being replaced by imports,” he added.

Bernd Schmitz from AbL (Germany) added: “As things stand, farms that are already operating in a resource-efficient manner despite higher costs would be disadvantaged in three ways: the EU is relaxing environmental standards and eliminating minimum budgets for agri-environmental measures.

“Additionally, it does not set fair market rules to compensate for the loss of subsidies by guaranteeing higher prices to farmers.

“CAP funding must be allocated in a more targeted manner, and the proposals on degression and capping must be implemented on a mandatory basics," Schmitz said.

‘Difficult situation'

Christian Wiertz, president of the MIG (Belgium) said: “Farmers are already in a difficult financial situation due to the fall in milk prices, which will continue to decline.

“We no longer have profitable prices. Combined with the diseases affecting us, it's a disaster. What are they planning for us?”

According to Wim Moyaert from Boerenforum (Flanders), food is a right, “not a commodity”.

He added: “The EU must immediately stop prioritising the interests of the agri-food and chemical industries.

“To do this, we urgently need to provide the necessary resources and support for our future generation of farmers and agricultural workers. Agroecology is now.”

Stéphane Galais, spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne (France) said that "anger is running high" in France, and "there is deep unrest around sanitary issues, as we see with the crisis on lumpy skin disease (contagious nodular dermatosis)."

“This is a free-trade disease: we are killing our cows to protect international trade.

“Our fight against the EU-Mercosur agreement is central to the survival of farmers.”