The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has said that there is a ‘hole in the heart’ of the European Commission’s Farm to Fork strategy.
The association has said that a new study by the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has shown that the objectives set out in the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies will deliver significant reductions in emissions.
However the ICMSA added that the study also predicted that these reductions are likely to be drastically reduced as food production switches to countries with lower, or no, comparable standards in what is known as ‘carbon leakage’.
Farm to Fork
Focusing on the emissions reductions set out in the Farm to Fork strategy, the research concluded that the measures were likely to cut farming emissions by nearly 30% according to ICMSA.
The research additionally noted that almost half that gain would be lost as production moved out of the EU to other less regulated locations.
The farming organisation said that the research also concluded that the Farm to Fork measures will inevitably result in EU farmers’ incomes being cut as they go through a ‘challenging transition’ due to the lower production and the lower yields that will result from the reduction in chemical fertiliser.
President of ICMSA, Pat McCormack said: “Irish farmers are going to struggle to see the point of us curtailing our production of dairy and beef – in which we certainly are amongst the most sustainable in the world – only to see that slack picked up and transferred to other producers that are notably behind us already, before we’ve even introduced the latest round of environmental improvements and sustainability measures.
“This is the hole in the heart of the EU’s F2F strategy. It only makes sense if we refuse to import foods from producers with lower environmental standards of production than ourselves.
“Otherwise we’re just pretending to ourselves that because the emissions didn’t happen here, they didn’t happen at all, and impoverishing ourselves while we’re at it,” he added.
Environmental standards
The head of ICMSA added that Irish farmers need to secure a firm commitment from the EU that no foodstuffs will be imported from any producer, processor or state, where lower environmental standards were utilised in the production of the food.
“Otherwise, we’re just pretending to deal with emissions and we’re pretending at the expense of the livelihoods of the already dwindling number of EU farmers,” McCormack continued.
The farm organisation president added that there are now two identifiable obstacles to the “logic” of the EU’s agri-food and environmental strategy.
“The first is the question of margins and the ending of the retailer-led ‘’cheap food’ policy, and the second is the question of how the EU is going to seal off its markets to imported food produced to lower environmental and sustainability standards,” McCormack said.
“These are not afterthoughts. If we don’t get these right, if we don’t get these first steps right, then our fear is that every subsequent step takes us further off the correct path forward.”
McCormack said that farm families are the ones directly in the firing line as a result of the Farm to Fork strategy.
The ICMSA is now insisting that the EU Commission carries out a full economic and environmental analysis of the strategy before poor decisions are taken that will have an impact on EU farm families and agriculture sector.