Farmers' protests peaked across Europe around this time last year. Rising production costs, unfair pricing, bureaucracy and foreign competition were among the drivers of the movement. The European Commission responded with a package of measures, and has now unveiled what it calls a "Vision for Agriculture and Food", the proposals coinciding with the annual agriculture show being held in Paris. We explore this strategy with the EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, Christophe Hansen, as well as the big international trade issues that the farming sector faces at the moment.

Asked whether agriculture will be dragged into the current trade dispute between the Trump administration and the EU, Hansen says: "This cannot be excluded, so we have to prepare for it. We have the experience from the first Trump administration when there were tariffs on our agricultural products. And in our Vision (for Agriculture and Food) we clearly refer to a unity safety net, meaning that we can strike back and react to coercion and blackmail, as it happened before. We are strong when we are united, but when this unity is challenged we are very weak, and this something we definitely need to address."

The commissioner elaborates: "We need to get into new markets. In June we have a high-level mission to Japan with our agriculture and food-producing sector in order to get them into those markets, so that they have alternatives and are not being blackmailed, as happened before."

On that issue of alternative markets to the US, Hansen underlines the importance of the Mercosur agreement with Latin American countries. Negotiations on the deal have concluded, but it has not yet been finally adopted. "We have a very positive export balance in trade," Hansen explains. "Our milk and cheese sectors would benefit from such an agreement. Wines and spirits are currently under pressure in the European Union, and they would benefit from it. The whole [agricultural] sector would benefit from it. What is important is that we give fair conditions to our farmers."

And on that issue of fairness, could French scepticism about the deal be overcome if more reciprocity guarantees are offered? "I'm not sure," Hansen answers. "But reciprocity is the right way forward. If we prohibit a product in the European Union, we can't expect farmers and consumers to accept that the same product comes in from outside. If something is bad for human health in the EU, it's also bad outside the EU. So I think it's very legitimate to go in that direction.'

Speaking of products that are bad for human health, we ask Hansen about the watering down of pesticide reduction targets inside the EU. Isn't this a contradiction – watching out for pesticides in imports from outside the EU while being less demanding on pesticide standards inside the EU?

'Well the proposal you mentioned was indeed to reduce pesticides by 50 percent," Hansen responds. "But I think it was not well thought through. For example, when the applicable surface area was calculated, railway tracks were excluded. Why? And then, in the EU Parliament, one particular group wanted to have a higher percentage target than the others. So the whole file exploded. I think we need to go more into incentives for farmers, rather than simply focusing on percentages. And we have to go into the deployment of new technologies. We have to accelerate biopesticides that can be an alternative to chemical pesticides."

We put it to Hansen that the rolling back of targets on pesticides is indicative of a turning away from green targets in agriculture in general, including on CO2 emissions.

"The European Court of Auditors stated that the green architecture is right to meet our 2030 objectives, so that is something we need to acknowledge," Hansen answers. (Editor's note: the ECA has not said that when it comes to enough soil being made available for organic farming, however.) "Our new eco-regimes have only been in place for a year and a half, so we need to let the policy work. But farmers know that they are very dependent on the climate and they are the first victims of it and they want to be part of the solution. And that is what we need to incentivise them for."

Simplification of bureaucracy has been a key theme of this European Commission, and agriculture is no exception.

"We need to work on simplification because farmers in the end chose the job not to be behind the desk or filling in forms," Hansen states. "They chose it because they want to produce outside on their fields, their crops and be with their animals. This is where we need to get them back to, and to make them more competitive again and more productive again."

Programme prepared by Luke Brown, Isabelle Romero, Oihana Almandoz and Perrine Desplats

We should work with trade partners that don't 'blackmail' us: EU agriculture commissioner

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