Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: ARTHUR NICHOLAS ORCHARD / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 8:48 p.m., January 31, 2024
French grain producers want to see customs duties reinstated beyond a quota of imports from Ukraine. “Between 2021 and 2023, imports of Ukrainian wheat into the European Union increased 20-fold,” said Eric Thirouin, the president of the General Association of Producers of Wheat and Other Cereals.
French cereal producers want to see customs duties reinstated beyond a quota of imports from Ukraine, saying on Wednesday they were "extremely disappointed" to see cereals excluded from "sensitive" products for which Brussels plans to limit the increase in prices. imports. “We are extremely disappointed. The problem is crucial for cereals. Between 2021 and 2023, imports of Ukrainian wheat into the European Union increased twenty-fold. We went from 215,000 tonnes of wheat in 2021 to 5 million tonnes in 2023,” Eric Thirouin, president of the General Association of Wheat and Other Cereal Producers (AGPB), told AFP.
In an attempt to respond to the anger of farmers, Brussels announced for "sensitive" products - poultry, eggs and sugar - an "emergency brake" to limit the volume of imports to the average levels observed in 2022 and 2023, levels beyond which customs duties would be reimposed.
“A call for air”
European agricultural organizations immediately deemed the exclusion of other products from such a mechanism “unacceptable”. "We must find the right balance between solidarity with Ukraine and the consequences for European agriculture. By removing customs duties, the EU has created a draft which is now generating very serious market distortions. difficult, in a context of rising production costs and falling prices (on the markets)", estimates Eric Thirouin.
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For French cereal growers, we must return to a "quota" or quota of cereals beyond which customs duties must again apply, pleading for a quota "less than 2 million tonnes, as was the case before the war". While since the end of 2023, the majority of export flows of Ukrainian agricultural products have again passed by sea, the AGPB emphasizes that it is “very difficult to measure what enters and leaves the EU”.
“A ferment of dislocation of the single European market”
"It is not because these flows go to sea that they do not return to Europe, whose market is over-attractive - better valuation, security of payment, absence of customs duties... They are going more and more more in the south of Europe, in Italy, in Spain...", explains Philippe Heusèle, general secretary of the AGPB. The association considers it urgent to tackle the distortions of competition, which affect "first and foremost Ukraine's immediate neighbors (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria)".
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“These neighboring countries are in the process of wanting to introduce import licenses, which is completely contrary to Community law. Beyond cereals, it is a catalyst for the dislocation of the single European market,” warns Philippe Heusèle.