The Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue must stop ‘tiptoeing’ around the prospect of a reheated Mercosur agreement and signal a veto in advance, ICMSA president Pat McCormack has said.

McCormack is strongly against any version of the agreement that does not tie South American food exports to the same standards of sustainability and environmental protection as that demanded of EU farmers.

McCormack argued that it is beyond satire that on a daily basis, EU governments (with the Irish Government in happy agreement) were adding more and more layers of environmental rules and stipulations to what are already the most heavily regulated farmers on the planet.

He added that they do this while making encouraging noises about conducting a trade agreement with South American states, whose own record of environmental protection was thin to non-existent.

Hypocrisy

"What is even more astonishing than the EU’s hypocrisy on the matter was the seeming inability of the Commission and other institutions to see the blatant contradiction between insisting that their own farmers meet ever more impractical environmental standards or go out of business, while simultaneously making sounds that would be heard in several South American countries as a green light to increase beef production by the usual expedient of clearing forest tracts the size of small countries," McCormack has said.

McCormack said that Ireland shouldn't wait for the French to make the first move.

“The Irish Government, through the Taoiseach, must announce now, upfront and categorically, that Ireland will never support any version of the Mercosur agreement that does not set out a requirement that any food or farm produce coming under the agreement must be produced to environmental standards equal to or greater than those operated within the EU.

"Either that happens or the shadow of a possible Mercosur agreement will fall on every single sustainability and environmental targets set out and the whole policy becomes a joke. It is either one or the other”, concluded McCormack.