On Thursday 7 April, Spain and France, along with the EU’s agricultural organisations and cooperatives (Copa-Cogeca), criticised the proposal to revise the 2010 directive on industrial emissions (see EUROPE 12926/2).
On Thursday 7 April, the Spanish minister Luis Planas said it was “unreal” that at this time, “with the priority we have with regard to food production, the European Commission is publishing this project in which it establishes that, for example, a farm with 150 cows is considered an industrial installation subject to the same regulations as the chemical industry. It seems to me that this is uncalled for”.
Two days earlier, the French minister Julien Denormandie spoke of “nonsense. We will fight at EU Council level to put reason back into this text”.
While only the largest livestock facilities in the EU were included in the scope of the text over the last decade, the Commission proposes to “multiply by almost ten” the number of cattle, pig and poultry farms covered, “by targeting family farms and categorising them as ‘agro-industrial installations’”, Copa-Cogeca regrets.
As it stands, the revision would force thousands of family farms to comply with a “costly emission protocol designed primarily for large companies”, the organisation regrets. It denounces that “this accounting [is] ideological and disconnected from the farm reality”.
Specifically, the Commission plans to include the rearing of pig, poultry and cattle above 150 ‘livestock units’. According to the Commission, this would represent only 13% of all the largest livestock holdings in the EU. In fact, with this threshold, in Germany and Finland more than 90% of broiler production would be considered as agro-industrial installations. In France, 90% of pig, beef and dairy production would be considered as ‘agro-industrial installations’, Copa-Cogeca objects. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)