A top European Commission official played down fears that soaring energy costs could cause food shortages in the coming months, after MEPs warned Tuesday about the economic pressure farmers are facing.
Farmers have seen the price of artificial fertilizer skyrocket amid a wider energy crisis across Europe, because natural gas, a fossil fuel, is a major ingredient in nitrogen-based fertilizers.
“Clearly there’s a huge issue here, but we need to look at it in perspective,” said Michael Scannell, deputy head of the Commission’s agriculture department.
Scannell was addressing concerns voiced by members of the European Parliament’s agriculture committee, such as Romania’s Daniel Buda from the European People’s Party, who said there could be a “very serious food crisis” if the EU fails to take urgent measures to mitigate the rising fertilizer costs in the coming months, especially since farmers are now sowing their winter wheat crops.
“We have 500 million consumer citizens in the EU — they must be fed. And I am very worried,” Buda said during the committee meeting, warning small-scale farms could go bust if the EU does not step in.
Scannell said the Commission is regularly analyzing the agricultural markets at a granular level. “We’re very close to the ground and the evidence to date doesn’t give us reason to be alarmist,” he said.
The Commission is pondering whether to remove anti-dumping tariffs on imports of liquid fertilizer from countries like Russia in order to increase the supply of fertilizers on the European market. However, that would remove the protection for European fertilizer producers.
Lifting anti-dumping measures on imports alone would not make a significant dent in reducing fertilizer prices for EU farmers in any case, Scannell said.
Source: Politico
