The meat sold in Leclerc supermarkets comes “99%” from outside the Mercosur zone, several South American countries at the center of a controversial draft trade agreement with the European Union, said its press representative Michel-Edouard Leclerc.
“99% of us do not sell Mercosur meat,” said Leclerc, asked on the Senate’s Public channel about the EU-Mercosur treaty that plans to eliminate the majority of customs tariffs between Europe and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and which the EU wants to adopt despite strong opposition from France and other European countries in its current form.
One of the main sticking points of the treaty concerns the prospect that beef imports from Brazil and Argentina, whose health standards are less strict than in the EU, will cause concern among French farmers ready to enter a second week of mobilization.
“This agreement should not be signed”
The large distribution giant Carrefour committed to “not market any meat from Mercosur”, in a letter sent on Wednesday to the majority agricultural union FNSEA, in which its general director, Alexandre Bompard, asks the “restaurant actors “Let them come.”
“On the other hand, our agri-food manufacturers (…) must tell us on processed products where their products come from,” Michel-Edouard Leclerc continued on Sunday, suggesting that pieces of meat from Mercosur could be found among the products. components of these products.
“The French and European administration is fighting to ensure that our farmers respect the rules, but we did not ask for the reciprocity clause, so it is not a good agreement,” he said again.
Source: BFM TV
