Meat industry demands in the EU-US trade deal

As trade negotiators from the United States and the European Union gather in Brussels for the latest round in negotiations for the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment partnership (TTIP), twenty-nine environmental, farm, and consumer groups sent a letter yesterday to United States Trade Representative Michael Froman. The groups sounded the alarm about the demands that the meat industry is lobbying for in the deal. The “meat and feed industries on both sides of the Atlantic are seeking to proliferate destructive practices in the animal agriculture industry,” said the groups. As tariffs are already quite low between the two economies, the aim of the negotiations is to “harmonize” regulations, which corporations characterize as trade barriers. For the EU, this means weakening important food and food safety regulations in an effort to bring them down to the US’s low levels.

Photo credit: Alliance for Natural Health from an article on Antibiotics for Farm Animals