FRENCH AGRICULTURE minister Michel Barnier has warned about the direction of world trade negotiations, telling the Taoiseach, Ministers and farming representatives during a visit to Dublin that proposals currently on the table are unacceptable.
But the French minister said Irish farmers who may be planning to use their vote on the Lisbon Treaty as a means of influencing the ongoing World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations should remember that the treaty and the trade talks are “two different exercises”.
“If we do not have the Lisbon Treaty, we still keep the WTO negotiations,” he said.
“Without the Lisbon Treaty, it would be more difficult to function and more difficult to reinforce our common policies. With 27 member states, we need an efficient toolbox so that we can preserve our agriculture and our common policies.”
The minister met with Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith and Irish Farmers Association president Pádraig Walshe yesterday to discuss the world trade talks and to assure them that France will preserve the interests of European farmers when it takes over the EU presidency in July.
On the current phase of WTO negotiations, he said: “What’s on the table today is not acceptable to us . . . We would not give an agreement to this negotiation, because it would compromise whole sectors of European agriculture such as cattle farming or sheep farming. Fruit and vegetable farming would be severely hit too.”
Furthermore, he argued, the “first victims of a bad agreement” would not be European farmers but developing countries that export to Europe.
European efforts had not been reciprocated, the minister told The Irish Times, and EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson had reached the “extreme limit” of his mandate.
“The EU reformed its common agricultural policy precisely to prepare for these trade talks . . . We would expect the same level of effort from our other partners and at the moment this is not the case. We cannot go any further if there are not similar efforts made by emerging countries or the USA.”
Mr Barnier said France would be “extremely vigilant” in ensuring a balanced outcome to the WTO negotiations, noting that all countries will have the right to veto “if the agreement is not good”. He said he hoped the French presidency would see a conclusion to the Common Agricultural Policy health check.
Mr Barnier noted that his visit came just over a month before the referendum on the treaty.
“I do not wish to intervene in the debate. It is a sovereign debate that belongs to the Irish people,” he said.
“But as a witness, as the French agriculture minister and as a former European commissioner, I would like to say that with 27 member states we need more efficient and more democratic institutions to talk, to discuss, and to decide. This is exactly the aim of the Lisbon Treaty.”