Spanish Agriculture Minister Luis Planas has called on the European Commission to temporarily halt introducing stricter environmental laws for European farmers. Environment and Climate Commissioners Sinkevicius and Timmermans presented new criteria against air pollution from 2027 on Tuesday, which will also apply to livestock farming.
The Spanish minister referred to the new food situation due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and said that the European Commission "must be consistent with itself."
On the other hand, he emphasized that it is currently only a proposal that will still need to be discussed in the coming years, including under the next Spanish presidency of the EU Council.
On Thursday evening, Planas received full support from French minister Julien Denormandie, who is currently chairing the ministerial council. Denormandie called the proposal 'nonsense.'
Denormandie called it ridiculous that the EU would apply stricter environmental rules to meat from European livestock farms, but not to imported meat from South America. Under the new criteria, large farms would henceforth be classified as 'industry.'
The Industrial Emissions Directive (EID) will apply to fifty thousand European industrial installations and 13 percent of all livestock farms in the European Union (EU), the European Commission reports. The tightening aims to eliminate air pollution and achieve a climate-neutral economy by 2050.
The Brussels proposal would affect 10 to 20% of poultry and pig farms in the EU and, for the former, also large livestock farms, which together are responsible for 60% of ammonia emissions and 43% of methane emissions from the livestock sector in the EU.
Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski was cautious in his comments on the proposal from his fellow commissioners at a press conference in Luxembourg. He pointed out that, thanks to his intervention, an earlier version of the proposal was weakened from farms with 100 to 150 cows, so that the stricter emission rules would apply not to 160,000 but 80,000 livestock farms.