The President of ICMSA and Dunbell farmer, Denis Drennan, said that the Government’s decision that Ireland would vote against the Mercosur Agreement was the right decision on both economic and environmental grounds. Mr. Drennan said that there were certain occasions and circumstances in which basic principles of fairness and consistency had to override hype and arm-twisting and opposing Mercosur was precisely one of those occasions.
“The Government left it very late, but has come down on the right side of what is a head-to-head between fundamental principles of fairness and consistency and the kind of slippery expediency that seems to be the dominant approach in far too many situations now. ICMSA and Irish farmers in general have never been against fair trade; the point is that – as regards food and particularly beef – the agreement with the Mercosur was not and could not be fair. We have no way of ensuring that the beef that would be imported into the EU under the agreement would be of the same standards of traceability and environmentally sustainable production that the EU insists upon for its own farmers. And we know from long experience that the authorities in Mercosur countries are unable or unwilling to enforce even their existing standards and regulations. That leaves us with the EU forcing its own farmers to compete against cheaper substandard beef produced off an environmentally destructive system that is the direct opposite of the farming system that has been painstakingly introduced onto EU farms over the last 20 years. That was a hypocrisy too far and ICMSA welcomes the Irish Government’s belated recognition of that fact.
