Cornucopia’s Take: Deregulation, policy decisions, quota expansion, and tariffs would enable huge meat corporations to rule the European and U.S. markets under TTIP, leaving family farmers out in the cold.


New Report Documents Corporate Meat’s Takeover Through TTIP
Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy
by Shefali Sharma

SellingOffTheFarmBrussels – Today at the European Parliament, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) Europe, Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft e.V. (AbL) (member of peasant farmers’ organisation Via Campesina), Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and PowerShift released a new report documenting how the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) empowers the global meat industry and undermines family farming.

The new report, Selling Off the Farm: Corporate Meat’s Takeover Through TTIP, is based on an in-depth examination of public negotiating positions, leaked negotiating texts, and industry documents. It analyses how TTIP’s “regulatory cooperation” agenda would affect existing rules that govern the U.S. and EU meat industries. The investigation found that the powerful meat industry is aggressively using TTIP to lower standards that protect public health, and undermine governments’ ability to create essential labour, environmental and animal welfare reforms in the future. If successful, TTIP would weaken regulations and undermine small-scale farming in Europe.

IATP Europe’s Director and co-author of the report, Shefali Sharma: “A TTIP deal would hand over Europe’s animal farming sector on a silver platter to transnational meat corporations–through tariffs and quota expansions, but definitively through the sweeping de- regulatory changes the industry hopes to win through the accord. The U.S. simply lacks essential rules that should curb the industry’s worse practices that cost taxpayers millions in environmental and public health costs. With TTIP, the EU industry will ensure that pending decisions on critical issues such as cloning, glyphosate and factory farms’ methane emissions are made with trade ‘competitiveness’ in mind and not the public interest.”

Read the entire article.

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