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1 month ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
BRUSSELS — Europe’s agriculture ministers have a message for the European Commission: Hands off the billions of euros of public money that go to farmers each year. The ministers, led by Italy and Greece, used their monthly summit in Brussels on Monday to push back hard against any attempt to fold the bloc’s €386.6 billion Common Agricultural Policy into a broader, more flexible EU funding model.
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1 month ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski |Camille Gijs
BRUSSELS — As the EU prepares to reimpose steep tariffs on Ukrainian farm goods next month, a top Ukrainian lawmaker has issued a blunt warning: The move risks not just economic damage to a war-battered ally, but a loss of trust in Europe itself.
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1 month ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski |Lucia Mackenzie
On the flat plains of central Poland, where densely packed poultry sheds crowd the landscape, the future of Europe’s meat industry hums to the rhythm of millions of broiler chickens. Inside, birds bred to grow at record speed shuffle under the constant glow of artificial light, each one a copy of the last. They live fast, grow faster and end their lives in industrial kill lines — destined for export to Germany, the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. Chicken isn’t just dinner.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
BRUSSELS — Europe’s favorite bottle of red or white may come with an unwanted ingredient: toxic chemicals that don’t break down naturally. A new investigation has found widespread contamination in European wines with trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) — a persistent byproduct of PFAS, the group of industrial chemicals widely known as “forever chemicals.” None of the wines produced in the past few years across 10 EU countries came back clean.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Laurens Cerulus |Hanne COKELAERE |Marianne Gros |Bartosz Brzezinski
BRUSSELS — All European Union laws are lobbied, but some are lobbied more than others. Brussels is known as a rulemaking machine. And, in line with many other political power centers, it is home to a staggering number of people whose job it is to influence the final shape of those rules.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
Hungary on Thursday confirmed a fifth outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) at a cattle farm in Rábapordány, near the Slovak border, escalating concerns over the spread of the highly contagious livestock virus first detected in the country last month. The latest case, confirmed by laboratory tests Thursday afternoon, prompted authorities to place the facility — housing some 600 dairy cows — under immediate quarantine, Agriculture Minister István Nagy announced on social media.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
In the summer of 1982, seven heroin users were admitted to a California hospital paralyzed and mute. They were in their 20s, otherwise healthy — until a synthetic drug they had manufactured in makeshift labs left them frozen inside their own bodies. Doctors quickly discovered the cause: MPTP, a neurotoxic contaminant that had destroyed a small but critical part of the brain, the substantia nigra, which controls movement.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
While a follow-up deal is taking shape, political sensitivities in several EU countries are slowing progress — and raising the risk that trade preferences lapse without a fallback. Poland’s presidential runoff falls on June 1, days before ATMs expire. In both Poland and Romania, some candidates have portrayed Ukrainian agriculture as a threat to local farmers. What should be technical talks on quotas have become politically charged, and Kyiv wants to avoid a messaging misfire.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
The European Commission will let Ukraine’s emergency access to the EU market expire in June, Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen confirmed Tuesday — ruling out an extension of the current regime while signaling that many existing trade limits are likely to remain in place. The temporary suspension of tariffs and quotas — dubbed the Autonomous Trade Measures — was granted after Russia’s 2022 invasion and will end on June 5.
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2 months ago | 
politico.eu | Bartosz Brzezinski
BRUSSELS — Donald Trump may not drink beer, but this week he messed up a lot of people’s pints. Beer was quietly added Wednesday to a list of aluminum-linked products now subject to a 25 percent U.S. import duty. The move, buried in a bureaucratic annex and part of a broader trade war unleashed by the Trump administration, has left European brewers fizzing with confusion — and drinkers foaming with rage. The uncertainty goes beyond cans.
