The EU Parliament’s agricultural committee has rejected the EU Commission’s plan to include cow and sheep farms in the wide-sweeping Industrial Emissions Directive (IED).
Rapporteur for the IED, Belgium MEP Benoît Lutgen with the EPP, celebrated on Twitter the committee’s rejection of the agricultural portion of the commission’s proposed revision.
“The directive on industrial pollution rejected in the Agri committee: Agriculture has nothing to do with it!” he tweeted.
Agriculture groups also welcomed the opinion. Copa-Cogeca, the largest interest group for European farmers, said in a statement:
The Committee simply rejected the Commission’s ill-suited legislative instrument towards livestock farming. Copa and Cogeca have been demonstrating for months the problems and difficulties that the application of the Commission’s proposal would cause on the ground, which is why we welcome the adoption of the report.
The Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) is the main EU regulation for pollutant emissions from industrial installations such as plants or large indoor chicken-raising facilities. It sets out the requirements that the facilities covered in the directive have to meet to get an operating permit and includes a “wholistic” set of factors such as emissions into air, water, and land, plus waste generation, use of raw materials, energy efficiency, noise, prevention of accidents, and restoration of the site when the facility closes.
Getting a permit requires an analysis of the impact of pollutant emissions and other factors, as well as showing that the installation incorporates the Best Available Techniques (BAT), which are also defined in EU regulations.
As part of the Green Deal and the zero pollution action plan, the Commission wants to expand the IED to include mining and factories that make electric car batteries, as well as more large animal farms. Currently, large poultry and pig farms are included in the directive, but cattle—sheep, cows, and goats—aren’t. The Commission wants to change that, adding farms with more than 150 cows to the directive and widening the scope to cover more poultry and pig farms.
Lutgen wrote in Parliament magazine in April 2022, shortly after the Commission presented its proposal, that the changes related to agriculture were not only contentious among member states but also impractical and facing wide opposition in the Parliament. He wrote,
Rearing cattle is an activity that mainly takes place outdoors, unlike all the chemical activities that are in the scope of the IED. It speaks for itself that you simply cannot put any kind of a filter on a cow’s “chimney.”
He also criticised the Commission for not including any so-called ‘best available techniques’ for the cattle farmers:
This means that the Commission is asking the European Parliament and the Council to blindly add the bovine sector to the list of industrial activities without knowing the financial consequences of the mitigating measures for farmers.
In his opinion, Lutgen acknowledged the need to reduce pollution from agriculture but said “the text the Commission has proposed is counterproductive and encourages a move towards greater concentration in the agricultural sector.”
“This proposal gives an undeniable competitive advantage to the biggest businesses, who will have less difficulty in shouldering the additional administrative and economic burden,” he added.
He called for removing the provisions in the Commission’s proposal related to cows and “maintaining the status quo” for pigs and chickens.
Copa-Cogeca echoed the MEP’s concerns saying that the Commission’s proposal “will place unbearable requirements on small and medium-sized farms, risking liquidation and/or excessive concentration on existing farms, and shift consumption of products originating in non-EU countries,” it had also stated.
In comments at a recent panel discussion hosted by The European Conservative, Dutch MEP Rob Roos explained that the Dutch government has for years been pushing the farm sector toward debt-drowned larger farms.
“The government has been pushing for decades to reduce small farms, financially encouraging farmers to buy up neighbour’s cattle, livestock,” he said. “Now there are huge farms, and those farmers are laden with debt with no way to pay it back.”
He noted that the increasing pressures on farmers, particularly since the question of nitrogen emissions has made the possibility of forced buyouts a looming reality, has pushed some farmers to suicide. Farming is a profession that has, sadly, long been known to have one of the highest suicide rates.
Roos also noted that the Parliament’s agriculture committee is usually the most realistic. But, though the agriculture committee has spoken on the Commission’s proposal, it must still pass through the environmental committee and the plenary before the negotiating position is finalised.
In March, the EU Council finalised its stance, which did not go as far as that of Parliament. The Council excluded only extensive (free-range) cattle farming from the directive. Intensive cattle (when cattle are raised mostly in feedlots) farming has increasingly become the norm in many member states.
