U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday shrugged off an earlier report of the EU plans from the Financial Times, which cited unnamed EU officials as saying they would present the idea this week.

A draft of the EU’s “Vision for Agriculture and Food” policy document, due to be published on Wednesday and seen by Reuters, confirmed the Commission would take a tougher line on imports to ensure a fair level playing field for Europe’s farmers.

“The Commission will pursue, in line with international rules, a stronger alignment of production standards applied to imported products, notably on pesticides and animal welfare,” said the draft.

“The Commission will ensure that the most hazardous pesticides banned in the EU for health and environmental reasons are not allowed back into the EU through imported products.”

The draft, which did not specify which pesticides were the most hazardous, could still change before it is published.

The EU move could block imports of U.S. soybeans and other foods treated with pesticides not used by European farmers.

A European Commission spokesperson declined to comment on the leaked draft document.

Trump said on Sunday the EU move would hurt Europe, and a White House official said the president would stand up for American farmers. Trump said the U.S. was sticking to its plans to implement reciprocal tariffs.

Tensions are running high between the U.S. and the EU after Trump’s decision to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports from March 12 and “reciprocal” tariffs from April, as well as separate tariffs on cars, pharmaceuticals and semiconductor chips.

The EU sets maximum residue levels in food imports of some pesticides banned in the EU.

Last year the Commission proposed to keep allowing residues of the fungicide cyproconazole and the insecticide spirodiclofen – which cannot be used by farmers in the EU – in imported products, despite European Parliament lawmakers demanding the thresholds were reduced to the lowest possible limit.

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The move could affect large sums of EU money. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of farming subsidies is worth around a third of its 2021-27 budget, or around 387 billion euros (C$571.4 billion) in payments to farmers and rural development.

A draft European Commission calendar of upcoming policies, seen by Reuters, showed the Commission will propose a CAP “simplification package” in the second quarter of this year.

“Simplification measures concerning the Common Agricultural Policy will address sources of complexity and excessive administrative burden for national administrations and farmers,” a second draft Commission document said.

The drafts could still change before they are due to be published on Tuesday.

Farmers across Europe wielded their political clout last year when they staged months of sometimes-violent protests against EU red tape. In response, the EU diluted green conditions attached to some farming subsidies.

The upcoming simplification plans are part of an EU drive to quickly streamline rules, aiming to make local industries more competitive and respond to U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to scrap regulations.

Reducing corporate regulation was a key election campaign pledge for Trump, who already rolled back rules on oil and gas drilling within his first days in office.

Danish government minister Jeppe Bruus, who manages Denmark’s “Green Tripartite” deal to bring the farming sector in line with climate targets, said his country supported CAP reforms that would simplify bureaucracy – but also offer farmers more support for green schemes.

“I totally agree on the agenda of deregulation, because it’s a monster that just keeps feeding itself,” Bruus told Reuters in an interview last week. “At the same time, we need to stay focused on how to address climate change.”

The European Commission has faced environmentalist criticism for responding to last year’s farmers protests by quickly paring back some of the subsidies’ green conditions.

The EU’s ombudsman launched an inquiry in September into the changes after NGOs complained that Brussels had breached EU law by failing to carry out a climate assessment before pushing through the changes.

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Inside the domes, researchers are growing pears in a controlled environment that simulates how climate change will affect the region in 2040. Their aim is to see what global warming has in store for Europe’s fruit growers.

“We expect more heatwaves and less even precipitation, so more droughts and floods as well. And overall, slightly higher temperatures,” Francois Rineau, associate professor at the University of Hasselt, said of the simulated climate inside the domes.

Early results from the scientists’ first harvest in 2023 suggest Belgian pears may be spared some of the worst impacts of climate change – which scientists expect to cut some crop yields and hike growers’ costs for irrigation to combat drought.

“The effect of climate change at the 2040 horizon on the quality of pears was very minor. However, we found a difference in how the ecosystem was functioning,” Rineau said, noting that an earlier growing season in the 2040 simulation appeared to result in the ecosystem absorbing more CO2.

Year-to-year variability means that one year alone cannot capture intermittent extreme weather and other changes in the climate which can wreak havoc on crops. The three-year experiment will cover three harvests.

This year’s harvest of 2040-era pears is being studied at the Flanders Centre of Postharvest Technology (VCBT), to check the fruits’ size, firmness and sugar content – and compare them to pears grown in domes simulating today’s climate.

“If we have a higher temperature on the trees, pears tend to be less firm and have more sugar,” VCBT researcher Dorien Vanhees said.

That’s bad news for growers. Less-firm fruit survives a shorter period in storage, reducing the quantity of pears growers can sell.

Floods, hail and drought have already affected European pear growers in recent years, as climate change begins to leave fingerprints on growing patterns.

Belgium’s pear production is expected to plunge by 27 per cent this year, according to the World Apple and Pear Association, owing to factors including an unusually early bloom and unusually late frost.

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The proposals reduce some of the environmental rules linked to the disbursement of tens of billions of euros in farming subsidies.

To receive subsidies, farmers would no longer have to leave four per cent of their land fallow to support biodiversity.

Farmers could carry out crop diversification, rather than crop rotation, and countries will be able to introduce exemptions from the rules if they face difficulties applying them, and in cases of extreme weather.

Small farms below 10 hectares (about 25 acres) will also be exempt from control checks or penalties for not complying.

The farming subsidy tweaks are one of many policy changes the EU has made, or is considering, in response to months of farmers’ protests over issues including cheap imports and EU regulations.

With less than two months until European Parliament elections, many EU lawmakers are anxious to address farmers’ concerns to attempt to ward off gains by far-right parties, for whom farmers represent a growing constituency.

However, Green lawmakers and campaigners have criticized the weakening of green rules as hasty, and not in the interests of Europe’s farmers, who are facing increased stresses from climate change-fueled extreme weather.

The European Commission has said it is not weakening its environmental ambitions, but making the rules simpler.

“Some elements of the Green Deal are difficult to fulfil for farmers. Our answer is some simplification of our requirements,” EU farming commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski told Reuters earlier this week.

Organic farming group IFOAM said the proposal did not address farmers’ concerns.

“The proposal fails to address the real issues of low prices linked to power imbalances and will ultimately undermine the EU’s environmental ambitions,” IFOAM President Jan Plagge said.

The proposal needs final approval from EU countries, which is expected in May.

—Additional reporting  for Reuters by Casey Hall in Shanghai

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From Poland to Portugal, farmers have won remarkable concessions in response to waves of street action, reshaping the European Union’s green politics months ahead of European Parliament elections.

Environmental activists and analysts say the policy backsliding illustrates the considerable political influence of farmers as mainstream parties seek to impede the far right and nationalist parties’ hunt for votes in rural areas.

Farmers again blockaded streets surrounding the European Union headquarters in Brussels last week, spraying manure to protest low incomes, cheap food imports and burdensome red tape. As they did so, the bloc’s farming ministers backed a new set of changes to weaken green rules linked to the disbursement of tens of billions of euros in farming subsidies.

When the last European elections were held in 2019, the Greens made strong gains and climate activist Greta Thunberg was voted Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.

“The elections in 2024 will be elections in the year of angry farmers,” said Franc Bogovic, a Slovenian lawmaker in the European Parliament and himself a farmer.

The scramble to placate farmers has impacted key pillars of EU policy, pressuring the bloc over its Green Deal and free trade accords.

EU environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius warned of a “disastrous” blow to the bloc’s credibility last week, when EU countries declined to approve a landmark law to safeguard nature, leaving it unclear if the policy will be passed.

Other green measures are hanging in the balance ahead of the election. EU countries asked Brussels last week to scale back and possibly delay a new anti-deforestation policy, which they said could harm local farmers.

In France, senators in March voted against ratification of an EU-Canada free trade deal, targeting a symbol of the EU’s willingness to open up markets and boost competition.

And while the EU has extended tariff-free access for Ukrainian food producers, it agreed last month to impose duties if imports exceed a certain level, in response to farmers’ protests.

Some farming groups acknowledge the response by policymakers to the protests is likely linked to June’s elections – but say the weakening of green rules is not what they want.

“Our demands (for fair prices) have not actually been met,” said Dutch farmer Leonardo van den Berg, a representative of farming association La Via Campesina.

Rural discontent

Farmers account for 4.2 per cent of the EU’s workforce and generate just 1.4 per cent of the bloc’s gross domestic product. However, their protests resonate in the countryside where discontent towards distant policymakers and questions of cultural identity run deep.

A report commissioned by the EU’s Committee of the Regions, published last month, found Eurosceptic voting was high in many rural areas, where concerns including over migration and lower economic opportunities boosted populist parties.

An Elabe survey in January showed 87 per cent of French people supported the farmers’ cause. In Poland, nearly eight in every 10 people backed the farmers’ demands, according to a poll by the Institute of Market and Social Research.

The far right in France and elsewhere paint the farmers’ protests as symptomatic of a disconnect between an urban elite and hard-up countryside folk. Farmers are a small group, but the far right thinks it can attract a much wider rural vote by extension, said Teneo analyst Antonio Barroso.

Far-right parties are jostling to be the standard-bearers of farmers’ discontent, using them to illustrate the perceived failure of what they consider elitist green policies, said Simone Tagliapietra, senior fellow at think-tank Bruegel.

“This is pushing mainstream political parties to recalibrate their own agendas,” Tagliapietra said.

In France, farmers are a growing constituency for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National) party. She has called for a halt to EU free trade deals.

Asked why farmers were proving so effective in influencing policymaking, agriculture ministers in Brussels last week described farmers as lynchpins of the rural economy.

“Everybody needs to eat everyday,” Finland’s minister Sari Essayah said. “(Farming) is one of those basic sectors we should support.”

Irish Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue said Europe needed to learn from the upheaval to food supply chains inflicted by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“We cannot take food security for granted,” he said.

Environmental campaigners warn of the pace at which environmental policies are being loosened for what they say is political expediency.

Changes to weaken environmental criteria linked to the disbursement of subsidies under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) had taken place at lightning speed without proper consultation, Greenpeace said.

“What they are now presenting as a set of simplification adjustments is literally a CAP reform worked out in a week,” said Marco Contiero, the group’s EU agriculture policy director, somewhat exaggerating what were still speedy proposals.

“This is a political, an electoral card being played,” he said.

A Commission spokesperson said the proposals to amend the CAP were “carefully calibrated, and targeted to maintain a high level of environment and climate ambition”.

The Commission consulted four EU-level farming associations and EU member states before proposing the measures to reduce bureaucracy for farmers, the spokesperson said.

—Additional reporting for Reuters by Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels and Sybille de la Hamaide in Paris

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The EU has already watered down some environmental policies in response to the sometimes violent protests, but with farmers still taking to the streets this week in Belgium and France, Brussels is under pressure to do more.

Draft conclusions for an EU summit on 21-22 March, seen by Reuters, showed EU country leaders plan to ask the European Commission to work without delay on “all possible short-term measures, including those to reduce the administrative burden and achieve simplification for farmers”.

The EU should also take action to strengthen the position of farmers in the food supply chain, and ensure they can earn a fair income, the draft said.

Having already withdrawn a law to reduce pesticides and weakened some nature protection measures, the EU is looking at new proposals to ease pressures on European farmers, including a reduction in farm inspections and the possibility of exempting small farms from some environmental standards.

The crisis in the sector comes as Europe faces increasingly dire warnings from scientists about the environmental damage industrial farming is causing, and the urgent need to protect nature in the face of worsening climate change.

The EU Environment Agency this week said current EU food policies are failing to address climate change risks.

It suggested Europe consider policies to encourage less livestock farming, since shifting to plant-based proteins could help farmers reduce their reliance on imported animal feed and use less water, which climate change is making an increasingly scarce resource in drought-stricken southern Europe.

Angry farmers have staged protests from Poland, to Germany, to France and Slovenia in recent months to draw attention to numerous complaints, including cheap supermarket prices, low-cost imports from outside of Europe, and EU green policies some say are excessive.

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Europe’s climate agenda is entering a difficult phase as it begins to touch sensitive sectors, such as farming, and as traditional industries face fierce green tech competition from China.

While the overall target was within the range recommended by the EU’s official climate science advisers, the EU executive weakened part of the recommendation concerning agriculture, in response to weeks of protests by farmers angry about EU green rules, among other complaints.

A previous draft of the EU target, seen by Reuters, had said agriculture would need to cut non-CO2 emissions 30 per cent by 2040 from 2015 levels to comply with the overall climate goal. That was removed from the final draft.

“We need to make sure we have a balanced approach,” European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told the European Parliament, as he unveiled the proposal. “The vast majority of our citizens sees the effects of climate change, does want protection, but is also worried about what that implies for their livelihood.”

Tuesday’s proposal will kick off political debate on the target, but it will be up to a new EU Commission and Parliament, formed after European Parliament elections in June, to pass the final target.

Polls show the June election could deliver a major shift to the right in the EU Parliament, which could make passing ambitious climate policies harder.

EU election

The apparent concession to farmers did not satisfy many right-wing members of the EU’s parliament who said the Commission’s green targets would constrain lifestyles and the economy.

“The farmers are revolting in Europe and the European Commission is coming with further unrealistic ambitions,” said Alexandr Vondra, from the eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists Group, criticizing what he called a drive to “force people to have a different lifestyle.”

Sylvia Limmer, an MEP from Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) criticized EU leaders for being “stupidly happy” about cutting CO2 emissions, adding that green policies were responsible for what she called a major economic meltdown.

On the other side, Left Group MEP Silvia Mordig said agriculture also needed to make an effort. “Don’t make the … mistake of not talking about agriculture, it does not solve the problem,” Green MEP Bas Eickhout said.

Energy mix

In its proposal, the Commission said the EU should set an economy-wide 2040 target for 90 per cent net greenhouse gas cuts compared with 1990 levels.

The EU plan focused on building an edge in European clean-tech industries, and maintaining public support for climate policy as the EU heads into the elections.

The aim is to keep European Union countries on track between the EU’s existing 2030 climate goal and its long-term aim of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

The 2040 target would transform Europe’s energy mix, with coal-fueled power phased out and overall fossil fuel use reduced by 80 per cent and replaced with renewable and nuclear power.

The draft also laid out the cost of failing to tackle climate change, in the form of more destructive extreme weather which could mean additional costs of 2.4 trillion euros in the EU by 2050 if global warming is not limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The EU reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent in 2022, from 1990 levels.

A second EU document, also published on Tuesday, outlined plans to capture and store hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 emissions by 2050 – one of many areas requiring huge investment in new technologies.

-Reporting for Reuters by Kate Abnett and Ingrid Melander.

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The proposal, made July 5 as the EU faces a political backlash against other green policies, follows an initial attempt by the Commission to introduce soil health legislation in 2006, which a minority of countries, including Germany and France, blocked.

The new plan would require countries to track soil health against criteria including erosion and excessive fertilizer nutrient levels. EU states would also need to identify sites where soils are contaminated with chemicals and address the areas that have health-harming risks.

The proposal would not oblige states to achieve minimum soil health levels.

The One Planet Business for Biodiversity, a coalition of companies including food industry players Unilever, Nestlé and Danone, criticized the proposal, saying it does not go far enough.

“Despite the worrying state of EU soils and the solutions mentioned in the proposal, it fails to propose an ambitious framework for co-ordinated development of soil health at the European level,” the group said in a statement.

The EU estimates at least 61 per cent of the bloc’s soil is unhealthy, driven by factors including degradation of peatlands and intensive fertilizer use.

Asked about the lack of binding targets, EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius said the aim was to first establish a clearer picture of soil health and methods to manage it more sustainably.

“We have to see the political landscape, too, of what would be acceptable to member states, with what we can go ahead,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Caroline Heinzel, a policy officer at the European Environmental Bureau network of campaign groups, said the proposal “falls short of expectations by not including legally binding targets or requiring mandatory plans.”

Separately, the Commission also proposed binding targets for countries to cut food waste and rules to make textile producers legally responsible for the cost of their waste, a move designed to drive investments in collecting, reusing and recycling old clothes and materials.

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Climate models suggest that after three years of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly, the world will experience a return to El Nino, the warmer counterpart, later this year.

During El Nino, winds blowing west along the equator slow down, and warm water is pushed east, creating warmer surface ocean temperatures.

“El Nino is normally associated with record-breaking temperatures at the global level. Whether this will happen in 2023 or 2024 is not yet known, but it is, I think, more likely than not,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Climate models suggest a return to El Nino conditions in the late boreal summer, and the possibility of a strong El Nino developing toward the end of the year, Buontempo said.

The world’s hottest year on record so far was 2016, coinciding with a strong El Nino — although climate change has fuelled extreme temperatures even in years without the phenomenon.

The last eight years were the world’s eight hottest on record — reflecting the longer-term warming trend driven by greenhouse gas emissions.

Friederike Otto, senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said El Nino-fuelled temperatures could worsen the climate change impacts countries are already experiencing – including severe heatwaves, drought and wildfires.

“If El Nino does develop, there is a good chance 2023 will be even hotter than 2016 — considering the world has continued to warm as humans continue to burn fossil fuels,” Otto said.

In Canada, El Nino’s effects are seen mostly during winters and springs, when it’s associated with milder-than-normal conditions in western, northwestern and central parts of the country.

Generally, according to Environment Canada, El Nino does not significantly impact Eastern Canada — including the Maritimes — but has been associated with reduced tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

EU Copernicus scientists published a report on Thursday assessing the climate extremes the world experienced last year, its fifth-warmest year on record.

Europe experienced its hottest summer on record in 2022, while climate change-fuelled extreme rain caused disastrous flooding in Pakistan, and in February, Antarctic sea ice levels hit a record low.

The world’s average global temperature is now 1.2 C higher than in pre-industrial times, Copernicus said.

Despite most of the world’s major emitters pledging to eventually slash their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions last year continued to rise.

— Kate Abnett is Reuters’ European climate and energy correspondent in Brussels. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said. That was despite the presence of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly.

The world’s average global temperature is now 1.1 C to 1.2 C higher than in pre-industrial times.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it had ranked 2022 as the sixth warmest since 1880. European Union scientists this week said 2022 was the fifth warmest year in their records.

Climate assessments produce slightly different rankings depending on the data sources used and the way records account for minor data alterations over time, for example, a weather station being moved to a new location.

NASA said temperatures were increasing by more than 0.2 C per decade, putting the world on track to blow past the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C to avoid its most devastating consequences.

“At the rate that we’re going, it’s not going to take more than two decades to get us to that. And the only way that we’re not going to do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt said he expected 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, due to a weaker La Nina cooling phenomenon.

“The global mean temperature will be even higher in 10 years from now,” said ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne, adding that unless countries stopped burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels temperatures would continue to climb.

Weather extremes

The changing climate fuelled weather extremes across the planet in 2022. Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, while in Pakistan floods killed 1,700 people and wrecked infrastructure, drought ravaged crops in Uganda and wildfires ripped through Mediterranean countries.

Despite most of the world’s major emitters pledging to eventually slash their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere last year reached levels not experienced on earth for three million years, Schmidt said.

At this year’s COP28 climate conference, countries will formally assess their progress towards the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C goal — and the far faster emissions cuts needed to meet it.

COP28 host the United Arab Emirates on Thursday appointed the head of its state-owned oil company as president of the conference, sparking concerns among campaigners and scientists about the fossil fuel industry’s influence in the talks.

— Kate Abnett is Reuters’ European climate and energy correspondent in Brussels.

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