Trade Commissioner given clear message on Mercosur

The European Commissioner who is responsible for trade deal negotiations, Maroš Šefcovic, attended a joint meeting of the Oireachtas Trade and Agriculture Committees.

He was challenged forcefully by Michael Fitzmaurice TD about the value of the safeguard clause that would launch an investigation when imports increased by at least 10% and import prices are at least 10% lower than domestic prices.

Fitzmaurice put it to Commissioner Šefcovic that if a price drop was less than 10% annually then nothing would happen.

“We could see a 9% drop in beef prices for the next five years and the EU would do nothing about it – under this trade deal the price of beef could drop by almost half.”

Standards

The farm organisations also met the commissioner and raised the issue on standards for imports.

IFA president Francie Gorman told the Irish Farmers Journal: “I made it very clear to him that the safeguards do not provide reassurances to farmers in Ireland. There is a fundamental issue with giving the green light to imports that fall well short of EU standards.”

ICMSA president Denis Drennan has described the EU as being in a “ridiculous public contradiction on Mercosur”.

Audit report

Standards in Brazil were inspected in an EU Audit that was carried out between 27 May and 14 June 2024, with the final report published around this time a year ago.

It concluded that “national legislation on the authorisation of veterinary medicinal products and the prohibition of the use of hormones and beta-agonists for growth promotion purposes in bovine animals is broadly similar to EU legislation”.

However, it also found that “the current arrangements in place to guarantee that cattle, meat from which is destined for the EU market, have never been treated with oestradiol 17ß for zootechnical or therapeutic purposes, are ineffective”.

The bottom line was that Brazilian authorities were “not in a position to reliably attest to operator compliance with the corresponding section in the model EU health certificate for bovine meat exports to the EU”.