On Friday 17 February, EU agricultural organisations and cooperatives were critical of an impact on the livestock sector that looks to be greater than expected in the European Commission’s proposal to revise the directive on industrial emissions.
“The approach adopted by the Commission is to set the threshold for the livestock sector at 150 livestock units (LSU), above which pig, poultry and cattle farms would have to comply with the directive”, Copa-Cogeca said.
To justify this approach, the Commission relied on an impact assessment. However, a recent presentation by the Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment to the EU Council Working Group on the Environment shows that a very different picture is emerging. While the data used for the revision of the directive dates from 2016, the Commission has data from 2020 which contradicts the percentage of farms covered by the text.
According to the Commission, 13% of farms in the EU would be affected by the proposal. However, taking into account the most recent data, the percentages increase from 15 to 58% for poultry farms and from 18 to 61% for pig farms.
Copa-Cogeca denounces the “miscalculation” and hopes that European decision-makers will take this new data seriously and reassess the proposal (see EUROPE 13111/10). (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)