“The Commission needs to make sure that we don’t pick up the bill for this dispute,” said Ksenija Simovic, senior policy adviser for trade at Copa-Cogeca, Europe’s largest farmer lobby.
One reason is the size China has: The sheer volume of the Chinese market is so big, that no one can ignore” it, said Joris Coenen, manager at the Belgian Meat Office, an export coordinating body.
“The second reason … is that we can sell products at the kilo price in China that in the internal market are practically considered waste — the byproducts, what we call the ‘offal,’” Coenen told POLITICO.
Cheaper Brazilian and U.S. protein is already cutting into Europe’s margins, complained Coenen, and EU producers can’t easily redirect volume to emerging markets like Vietnam and the Philippines.
In threatening higher pork duties, Beijing is also “piggybacking”: trying to profit from a step they might take anyway due to domestic oversupply, said Jacob Gunter, lead analyst on economy for the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).
Given that politicians are still wincing at the memory of this year’s spate of farm protests, Beijing has been smart to menace agriculture so close to a European parliamentary election, argued Gunter at MERICS.“Farmers always vote and they’re very sensitive to even small disruptions in the prices of what they’re selling,” he said.
The original article contains 842 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 74%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!