The text adopted today in the European Parliament’s Agri Committee on the targeted reform of the Common Market Organization (CMO) is “a genuine betrayal of farmers.” This is the accusation by Greens/EFA MEP Cristina Guarda, who voted against the text together with her group.

The objective, Guarda explains in a statement, “was ambitious: to strengthen farmers’ position in the value chain, finally giving them the power to protect their income through mandatory, robust and transparent contracts, also applicable to cooperative members.”

Instead, she continues, “right-wing politicians deliberately chose not to fight for this; they preferred to sell out farmers’ dignity in order to score a few meagre wins in a cultural battle over the use of the word ‘burger’ and meat denominations.”

For the MEP, it was “an ideological fight pushed by the rapporteur, with active support from the right, aimed solely at sacrificing the sector’s real economic interests.”

The result, according to Guarda, “is a text that allows Member States to exempt entire sectors from the obligation to use written contracts by citing ‘justified reasons’ so vague that they hollow out the whole reform. It is an unacceptable derogation that hits the dairy sector in particular, which has been under unsustainable pressure for months and needed strict rules on price transparency and contractualisation to protect producers’ livelihoods.”

“I cannot endorse this instrumentalisation,” Guarda adds. “The rapporteur and certain agricultural representatives have used producers’ rights as a screen to wage identity battles, ultimately harming those they claim to defend. Calling producers’ position ‘strengthened’ in this text is an insult to the facts; it is an empty label that hides the right’s inability to deliver concrete results for farm incomes.”

Guarda says “coherence is needed: farmers are not protected by ideological flags or propaganda about product names, but by genuine revision clauses and transparency on value. We will not concede on this. As rapporteur for the next CMO reform, I commit now to correcting these flaws and restoring concrete tools, exposing those who prefer slogans over the economic survival of people who work the land,” she concludes.