EU proposes safeguards to protect EU farmers under Mercosur agreement

(Illustration: AI)

The proposal sets out procedures to ensure the timely and effective implementation of bilateral safeguard measures on agricultural products, according to a statement from Brussels. It includes specific provisions for certain sensitive agricultural products, such as beef, poultry, rice, honey, eggs, garlic, ethanol and sugar. Specific provisions ensure enhanced monitoring, clear root causes and a rapid response.

Regular and detailed monitoring will allow for early identification of risks and rapid action to remedy potential negative impacts

The Brussels body will examine as a priority cases of surges in imports or falling domestic prices affecting several Member States, they underlined. The EU Commission will launch an investigation, for example, if import prices of producers from the countries of the South American Common Market (Mercosur) – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, whose membership has been suspended since 2016 – are more than 10 percent lower than those of EU products of the same or competing products, or if the annual import of a product originating from a country covered by the agreement under preferential conditions increases by more than 10 percent, or the import price of the product decreases by 10 percent compared to the previous year. If the investigation establishes a risk of injury or the existence of such injury, the EU may temporarily withdraw the tariff preferences for the products in question, they wrote. The proposed regulation must be adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union under the ordinary legislative procedure.

MTI