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Irish Chefs Join the Stand Against TTIP

April 20, 2015 ARC

Saturday 18th April was the Global Day of Action for sharing information, raising public awareness and staging demonstrations against TTIP. Seven events were organized in Ireland and over 700 took place around the world, involving a diverse range of civic agencies, social and environmental NGOs and many other interested parties. In Ireland this included chefs, led by the non-profit chefs’ organization Euro-Toques Ireland. In the weeks leading up to it big names including Jamie Oliver and Darina Allen spoke out from the chefs’ corner, voicing their concerns for the future of food and agriculture in the European Union should the TTIP treaty be ratified. “The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement poses a serious threat to the well-regulated Irish and European food industry,” said Darina Allen in a statement from Slow Food Ireland last week. “Who will benefit from this agreement? It will certainly not be consumers, who will see food information further weakened over longer food supply chains, nor will it be the large majority of small-scale producers, serving local markets, who make […]

Main stories

Ending Milk Quota: Corporate Giants the Real Winners

April 8, 2015 ARC

Guest post by Siobhan o Donoghue of Uplift The milk quota system across Europe came to an end on April 1st. Listening to the dominant media and political commentary in Ireland you could be forgiven for thinking that this landmark event heralds the beginning of great things for farming and farmers. In fact the ending of the famous milk quota system just accelerates the race to the bottom for sustainable farming. The deregulation of milk production risks destabilising the market. Farmers will find it harder to secure a fair price for milk as corporate businesses become more powerful and gain more control of the market. Smaller farming families will find it more difficult to stay in business and out of debt because of inevitable fluctuations in milk prices. The Irish government’s Food Harvest 2020 Strategy predicts that milk production will increase by 50% with the removal of milk quotas. Agriculture is Ireland’s largest contributor to overall Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for over 30% of our total GHG emissions. By 2020, emissions from the agriculture […]

Latest from Brussels

Will organic farming save “unbalanced” Romanian agriculture?

April 6, 2015 ARC

According to recent figures released by Eurostat, Romanian agriculture is highly unbalanced. That is not the big surprise. In the last 20 years the country’s agricultural landscape was in a continuous transformation; agrarian reforms without a long term vision, real estate and agribusiness “cowboys” from all over the world speculating on low prices, productions focusing mostly on export commodities…all in a country of peasants versus their institutional neighbours. The surprise lies in how different stakeholders interpret these figures. Let’s have a look. According to the EU analysis, Romania is the 8th agricultural power of Europe and for the year of 2014 has an agricultural production estimated to 15.5 billion Euro (1160 Euro/hectare). Poland was the only other ex-communist country which outranked Romania having a 22.5 billion Euro (1660 Euro/hectar) production. The top ranks go to France, with its 70.5 billion Euro and Germany – 51 billion Euro production. Where is the great unbalance? Crop production amounts for 73% of the total, 26% being attributed to animal farming and only 1% represents agricultural services. On the […]

Latest from EU Member States

End of milk quotas: how will eastern Europe cope?

April 2, 2015 ARC

By Laetitia Nourry, Eco Ruralis intern on Food Chains Campaign 30 years after its setting up, the milk quota system is coming to its end. Europe is returning to unlimited production of milk where the benefits go to industrial farming. Another stab for the slowly disappearing peasant farmer. Milk quotas were set up in 1984 by the Common Agricultural Policy, to regulate the supply and demand and avoid prices collapse. So why lift them now? The reason is for economic. As milk consumption is increasing, especially in Asia (the demand of milk should double by 2022), the European Union definitely wants to keep its first place as milk exporter to the world. To reach this goal, one solution proposed by the EU leaders says that “farmers should be more aware of the market signal“. In other words, produce more milk, again and again, at the cheapest price. Hyper-production, exports, economic growth…but what is the price ? The end of quotas will indeed enrich big producers. Industrial farms will be able to produce milk in impressive […]

Latest from Brussels

TTIP: “very negative impacts” says Irish Farmers Association

March 31, 2015 ARC

As EU Trade Commissioner Cecile Malmstrom visited Ireland last Friday, The Irish Farmers Association (IFA), Ireland’s largest farming organisation, has expressed serious concerns about the transatlantic trade and investment partnership, TTIP. The organisation made reference to newly published Copenhagen Economics report, commissioned by the Irish government, which identifies, in the words of IFA President Eddie Downey “very negative impacts for Ireland’s vital beef sector”. According to the IFA “following a meeting yesterday with the authors of the report, both Copenhagen Economics and officials from the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment accepted that TTIP presented very significant risks to both our beef and white meats sector.” Beef is the largest agri-food sector in Ireland, employing over 70,000. The Copenhagen Economics report was commissioned to assess the potential impacts of TTIP on Ireland. While positive on potential jobs growth, citing up to 10,000 new jobs for Ireland, it also predicts that the Irish beef sector will be badly hit by TTIP. The IFA’s new position paper on TTIP says “as a fundamental principle, EU negotiators must insist on equivalence of standards. […]

Latest from Brussels

The Great Simplification Scam

March 27, 2015 ARC

Simplification of the CAP is a hot topic at the moment, and will be until at least May. At the most recent Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting (19/03/2015) “ministers exchanged views on their experiences in the implementation of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The most important issues highlighted as needing simplification in direct payments were the ‘greening’ measures and the controls.” Minister Jānis Dūklavs recalled that “member states supported the efforts of Presidency to agree Council conclusions on CAP simplification in May. Some of the issues raised by the member states require urgent attention as rules will have to apply on the ground already this spring. There are some areas where simplification might be possible through minor amendments to the existing provisions established by the Commission” The momentum for simplification comes from the Commissioner Hogan, who emphasised it in a December speech: “We need to simplify our rules now and cut red tape in an effective way” he said, promising to have made progress within a year. In this speech he asked for submissions on […]

No Picture

CAPwatch

March 23, 2015 ARC

Analysing CAP expenditure provides a great opportunity for civil society organisations to assess whether CAP will really be, as was promised, greener and fairer. Here on CAPWatch, we will give you the facts and provide our own analysis. So CAPWatch will step behind the basic stats and the spin, and, using our own specially developed metrics, reveal just how fair and green CAP 2014-2020 is.[show-map id=’1′] For more details click on the member stateThe details used here will mainly be ex-post expenses, based on  the financial reports provided by the European Commission and data provided by EuroStat. Expenditures are annually published by the European Union: this gives us the chance to make analyses and comparisons on a quantitative basis. This then allows for the calculation of very simple and useful indicators, such as percentages, monetary values of expenditure per Member State (MS), per hectare, for specific policy objectives etc.) to figure out the way CAP  money is spent on land, per worker*, per value added and per rural development priority. These calculations will highlight the real weight of […]

Newsflash

ARC NEWSFLASH March 2015

March 1, 2015 ARC

ARC NEWSFLASH March 2015 Hello from Oliver and Luise, Arc2020’s Communication team! Welcome to our March newsletter. We’re still full of enthusiasm after meeting up with almost 200 other civil society activists at our Good Food, Good Farming conference in Brussels. People from dozens of food and farming NGOs, as well as farmers, policy makers, academics and concerned citizens, all converged on the Belgian capital last month to tackle the question: how do we fix our broken food system? The aim of the event was to develop a roadmap for a common food policy. You can contribute to this process by going to our roadmap page and giving us your thoughts. The conference link takes you to a great 5 minute video overview, as well as some fantastic graphic harvesting art from the event itself, and lots more. Well worth a visit. We’re also running a Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) and agroecology project, and have published a brochure outlining ten of the best examples of ‘transitioning towards agroecology’ around the EU. North, south east, and west of the Continent are all covered, as are many agri-food […]