The Spanish agricultural sector is once again facing new obstacles in its path. Just a few months ago, farmers and ranchers took to the streets to denounce that non-compliance with the Food Chain Law, as well as unfair competition from other non-EU importers and bureaucratic and environmental asphyxiation were destroying the sector. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food adopted 43 measures and from Brussels, the European Commission also committed itself, among other actions, to reducing the administrative burden of the agricultural sector and excluding it from certain emissions reduction requirements. But Europe has given a mixed blessing, above all, to intensive poultry and pig farming, which it has included in its new directive to reduce polluting emissions from industry.
The updated Industrial Emissions Directive came into force a week ago and Member States have 22 months from that date to transpose its provisions into their national legislative frameworks. With the implementation of the legislation, it is expected that By 2050, emissions of air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, ammonia, mercury, methane and carbon dioxide will be reduced by 40% compared to the levels observed in 2020. Its emission will be regulated by obtaining permits in the Member States, provided that industrial and agro-industrial facilities comply with the required requirements.
Specifically, the directive reduces certain thresholds for animal husbandry, covering intensive farms with 300 heads for pigs and 280 for poultry (300 if they are laying hens) and 350 animals for mixed farms -in all cases, these are units equivalent to large livestock, so the 300 units for laying farms would be equivalent to a census of 21,429 hens (previously 40,000)-, with regulations that will be applied progressively from 2030 and starting with the largest farms. Extensive farms and the breeding of animals for domestic use, as well as cattle farms, are excluded.despite being one of the main causes of methane emissions. On the other hand, it does cover “the extraction and processing of non-energy minerals produced on an industrial scale, such as iron, copper, gold, nickel and platinum” and opens the door to including other industrial minerals if the European Commission makes a proposal in this regard.
Violations of the regulations will be sanctioned depending on their severity and duration, whether they are recurrent and the people and the environment affected. In the most serious cases, Fines must be “at least 3% of the operator’s annual turnover in the EU”Furthermore, it is the first EU environmental law to provide citizens with the right to claim compensation for damage to health resulting from a breach of the directive.
Miguel Ángel Higueras, director of the National Association of Pig Producers (Anprogapor), explains that poultry and pig farming are responsible for 3.5% of emissions in Europe, a “very secondary” level, and complains about the exclusion of cattle from the directive: “When the methane producer falls outside the emissions standard, it is clear to us that this is a political issue.”. In his opinion, the directive is “disproportionate” because it reduces the number of livestock to force farms to apply for environmental authorization. “A lot of very small farms come into play that have to meet environmental requirements for which, due to their size and capacity, they will not be prepared,” he criticizes. “On these farms, The economic effort – mostly in bureaucratic fees – and the changes do not justify the supposed environmental improvement for the EU at all.because this will be 0.0005%,” he adds. Thus, he believes that the application of the standard will entail additional costs and a greater bureaucratic burden, but it will hardly have an impact on a reduction in emissions.
According to Jaume Bernis, head of pork at COAG, the directive “criminalizes livestock farming and compares it to various industrial forms that have nothing to do with each other. “We have had emission controls for years. We have already quantified the greenhouse gas emissions we produce, as well as the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash we produce. What else is missing? It is not fair that they treat us as if we do not comply with the standards that we have complied with until now,” he complains. “Obviously we want to improve animal and human welfare, but we also want farmers to be able to earn a living. If investments are so high that they cause an unsustainable extra cost, we are at a disadvantage with regard to meat from third countries”Bernis warns.
In laying poultry farming, however, the impact will be more moderate. The vast majority of commercial laying poultry farms in Spain are outside the scope of the directive (of the 1,638 registered in 2023, 321 would fall within the scope). Those that are already within the scope (208 farms), which account for the majority of the laying hen census, have their environmental authorisations up to date and have been applying the best available techniques (BAT) to reduce emissions for years, when the current regulation came into force, the Interprofessional Organisation of Eggs and Egg Products (Inprovo) explains to LA RAZÓN. In addition, the new affected farms (113) will not have to make major changes, since the BATs are, in general, known and applied normally by the sector and do not involve significant extraordinary expenses.
Entering the scope of the directive does, on the other hand, imply a additional administrative burdenbecause it is necessary to request the environmental authorization and detail the data of the activity and the emissions and the BAT applied to obtain it, as well as to declare the emissions to the Ecogan system annually and renew the permit periodically, and also in case of substantial modifications to the facilities. For this reason, Inprovo demands that the administrative burden be simplified.
But poultry farming faces another major obstacle: the economic impact of the proposed EU animal welfare legislation for the laying poultry sector. According to a report presented by Inprovo and carried out by Animal Production professors from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the CEU Cardenal Herrera University in Valencia, the economic cost of transforming farms to cage-free systems will mean total investments of more than 2.3 billion euros.
The interprofessional organisation indicated that reducing the density of farms to five hens per square metre could reduce the number of layers by 13% in the EU (from 379 million birds to 330 million). This would hamper productivity and the EU would go from having a surplus to having to import eggs. In addition, the elimination of cages on farms will also have an impact on consumers’ pockets. The cost of producing a dozen eggs in a free-range system would be 17.3% higher than producing them in cages, while in the case of free-range hens the increase would be 30.9%.
For this reason, Inprovo has requested that the construction of new facilities with cages be prohibited from the moment the new regulation is published, that the transformation be carried out gradually, that the text incorporate financial aid with additional funds to those contemplated in the CAP budget and that an abandonment plan be established with aid for those producers who do not wish to continue their activity.
As for the impact of the directive on miningCésar Luaces, general director of the Spanish Confederation of Mineral Raw Materials Industries (Primigea), explains that it only affects a small part of the extractive industry, specifically part of metal mining and some industrial minerals, precisely because the sector is already subject to other directives that require it to control waste, emissions, water consumption, etc. In Luaces’ opinion, although the impact is limited, the rule supposes, as denounced by the other affected sectors, a redundant bureaucratic burden.