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Since the start of the year, protests have engulfed the rural world in Europe: too many standards, ecological requirements, unfair competition. Various reasons and increasing manifestations. Already in 2019, they had shaken the Netherlands and Belgium, where breeders contested plans to reduce livestock numbers to halve polluting nitrogen emissions by 2030.
Environmental standards considered too heavy in France and Germany, too. This agricultural crisis has also spread to southern Europe, where farmers suffering from the effects of global warming consider themselves insufficiently helped. Eastern European countries have, for their part, blocked imports of Ukrainian cereals, made easier since the war in Ukraine, and which are causing prices to fall.
Criticism is finally coming against the free trade agreements signed by the EU and which are accused of promoting unfair competition that is not respectful of the environment. In this context, should we revise the Common Agricultural Policy, which represents a third of the European budget, or slow down the pace in the application of the Green Deal driven by the European Commission?
Program prepared by Perrine Desplats, Sophie Samaille and Agnès Le Cossec