The European Union’s priorities have changed in recent years as the drive towards increasingly stringent environmental standards has been replaced by new defence and security policies.
The Irish Farmers Journal caught up with Ksenija Simovic, senior policy adviser with COPA-COGECA, to discuss these changes and what they mean for the agricultural sector.
Simovic said that the green deal has passed to the competitiveness deal, where environmental ambitions need to match the other economic and social ambitions of the EU.
She added that while the pipeline of fresh regulations has been turned off for now and that this is an important shift in EU policy, there is still a lot of work being done to implement the rules already introduced.
“We are in a bit of a green deal hangover, where we have to see how to implement everything that has come out from the green deal,” Simovic said.
“We now see to see how these work and how they can be implemented on the ground.”
Another focus for COPA-COGECA at the moment is the implementation of trade deals. This is a hot topic at the moment because of the controversy surrounding the Mercosur agreement and how the safeguards which have been put in place will be monitored and adhered to.
“Once we agree an opening to a market, we really have to make sure we can access that market,” Simovic said.
“Also, we need to invest in the B2B [business-to-business] relationships in those markets so we can actually send our products there.”
She agreed that signing trade deals is just the start of the work on opening markets, adding that: “Trade deals need to be leveraged to remove those barriers [to trade] that existed before.”
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