The new CAP will contain measures to support the production of animal feed in the EU, Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has said.

The EU should be self-sustainable in feed and should not be relying on third-country imports, the Commissioner told the European Parliament’s environment committee on Thursday 4 June.

He was responding to a question from Irish MEP Mick Wallace who asked how the newly proposed Farm to Fork strategy would align with the EU-Mercosur trade deal.

“We are cutting down trees in the Amazon to grow cereal to feed livestock in countries like Ireland so that we can sell dairy products to the Chinese, it's absolute madness,” Wallace said.

Mercosur

He said the EU-Mercosur deal was bad for farmers on both sides and for the environment.

“Should we not be helping them produce food for local consumption at a fair price and protect them from unfair competition from cheap imports?” the Wexford native asked.

Commissioner Wojciechowski said he agreed that it was not good to have farming sectors dependent on feed supplies from outside the EU.

He made specific reference to supplies from South America from which the EU imports a significant quantity of soya bean to address its deficiency in protein feeds.

“We're talking about Farm to Fork and that aim obviously means that everything we have on the table that we're using our fork for comes from our farms. And we shouldn't have to import these products from far away,” the Polish commissioner said.