Italy has announced plans to tighten the terms of the clauses in the agreement with Mercosur

Italy wants to set a stricter threshold for suspending imports as part of a planned trade agreement with Mercosur, the country's agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida said on January 8.

"We want this threshold of 8% to be lowered to 5%. And we believe that there are conditions to achieve this result," Lollobrigida was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.

According to the safeguard clause mechanism, the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur will be suspended if imports from Latin America exceed this threshold of 5% proposed by Italy.

The minister also added that Italian diplomats are conducting final safety checks on food products from Latin America.

"We are at the last stage," the Italian minister said.

Italy wants to ensure that agricultural products imported into the EU meet the same standards as those imposed on producers from the bloc.

Tractors against Brussels: why farmers are rioting in the EU

Experts are convinced that the agrarian lobby in the EU is well organized, and the protests will only intensify.

TVP Info TV channel reported on December 30 last year that farmers in Poland organized mass protests against the signing of a trade agreement between the European Union and the South American Mercosur common market.

On December 20, Bloomberg reported that the EU had once again failed to sign a trade agreement with Mercosur. According to Agatha Demare, a senior researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, failure to enter into a partnership with Mercosur "would be a huge mistake for Europe's ambitions to take a significant place on the global economic stage."

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