The French Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, on Thursday 7 April strongly criticised the proposal to impose pollutant emission thresholds on farms considered industrial.
This proposal revising the 2010 Industrial Emissions Directive has also been criticised by Spain and Copa-Cogeca (see EUROPE 12928/21, 12926/2).
The Commission has proposed to extend the scope to cattle, pig and poultry farms with more than 150 ‘livestock units’ (i.e. 150 adult cows, 10,000 chickens, 500 pigs or about 300 sows), which would represent 185,000 farms in the EU.
“Is a farm with a hundred suckler cows in our mountains in Europe a factory farm? The answer is no!”, Julien Denormandie declared furiously after the Agriculture Council.
“At the same time, meat from farms using growth-promoting antibiotics on 10,000-cow South American farms is being allowed into Europe. This is an aberration”, he said, noting the call from Paris to impose “reciprocity” of standards in trade.
“Several Member States have expressed their reservations with the same force as France”, said Denormandie.
Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski argued that the proposal had already been softened, as the Commission initially envisaged including holdings of 100 ‘livestock units’ or more, a lower threshold than that finally retained in the proposal.
“We need to discuss this. It is not only the size of a farm that determines whether a farm is industrial: sometimes a small number of animals can be intensively reared and sometimes you have a large number of animals on free-range pastures”, the Commissioner acknowledged.
The Commission estimates that 13% of European farms will be affected, covering 60% of ammonia emissions (compared to 18% today) and 43% of methane emissions (compared to 3%). The aim is to achieve a 10% reduction in these emissions. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)