Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Antitrust Guidelines for Sustainability Agreements in Agriculture: Discussion

Ms Henrieta Jany-Roskova:

I apologise, I did not fully understand the link between the nature restoration law and the sustainability agreement. What is mandatory for an individual farmer cannot be considered as sufficiently ambitious to benefit from the sustainability exclusion. However - and I apologise for my lack of in-depth knowledge of the nature restoration law at this juncture - when it comes to laws that are mandatory and binding on the member states this is not considered to be hindering the fact that there are agreements that go beyond standards that would be binding on individual farmers. If there are no binding standards on individual farmers then everything beyond zero is better than nothing. One would need to see, on the basis of a case-by-case assessment, whether this co-operation and this agreement is necessary, at the individual level, and whether the restrictions to competition are necessary to achieve this objective.