France, which will hold the rotating Presidency of the EU Council as of January 2022, will make it a priority to tighten controls on agricultural imports of the EU27 in order to impose European environmental standards, French Agriculture Minister Julien Denormandie said on Monday 6 September in Slovenia.
On the sidelines of the informal meeting of the EU Agriculture Ministers, the French Minister told the press that he would prioritise reciprocity in trade and ‘mirror clauses’.
The aim, he says, is to demand the same environmental and health standards for imported agricultural products as for European production, by including ‘mirror clauses’ in trade treaties to ensure convergence of standards.
“If we want the agro-ecological transition to be even faster, it can only be done on one condition: stop massively importing products that do not respect this transition”, insisted Mr Denormandie.
“We cannot have a Green Deal that reduces our cultivated areas and compensate with imports, which would themselves amount to importing carbon and degraded biodiversity”, the French Minister insisted.
In the CAP reform negotiations, MEPs wanted to ban the import of products with traces of pesticides banned in the EU, but some EU countries and the Commission felt that this would contravene World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.
The final agreement includes a joint declaration on the importance of imposing the same environmental standards on imported products as in the EU and instructs the Commission to come forward with proposals (see EUROPE 12753/6).
Julien Denormandie intends to build “a political consensus” with his counterparts before seeing “what form” the trade reciprocity requirement could take.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on 3 September that Paris would maintain its opposition to the EU/Mercosur trade agreement, deeming it “incompatible” with the EU’s climate agenda in its current state (see EUROPE 12761/18). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)