My name is Hani van Giel, I am a farmer from the Netherlands.
I am a member of the Coordinating Committee of the European Coordination of La Via Campesina.
It is called ECVC. It is a platform of 27 farmers' organizations all over Europe,
countries within and outside of the European Union.
We are part of La Via Campesina, the world movement, and La Via Campesina has 9 regions all over the world
with more than 200 million farmers as members and we define food sovereignty.
We oppose the TTIP agreement and free trade agreements because we think that farmers are not able to compete on a worldwide level.
This will lower the quality of food, it will destroy the life of many farmers.
This is already happening in many countries all over the world and also in Europe because every day a lot of farmers stop with their work.
Our concern is who will produce the food of the European citizens in the future when TTIP comes.
Our farmers will not be able to contribute to the food system.
A lot of the food in Europe is still being produced by small scale farmers who are related to rural communities who produce not only food but also landscape,
very environmentally friendly and if this trade agreement will be signed and agreed upon then in Europe we will have big industrial farms
and the landscape will be changed enormously.
We will lose a lot of employment because farmers provide not only food but also employment for themselves and their families
and they produce really quality food.
If TTIP will be agreed upon then the people in Europe will have to eat mostly processed food.
Farmers will have to produce for a processing industry and farmers lose their jobs.
We will have very big industrialised farms with also migrant labour because this is also part of the problem that in those industrialised farms
there is not a system of family farming anymore but it will become a system with manager farming farmers
and migrant labour or very cheap labour is raised to the bottom only on price and not on quality.
So that's why we oppose strongly this TTIP agreement.
If the agreement passes, citizens can no longer eat quality food. They will eat processed food, mainly processed food.
You don't know where the ingredients of the food come from because all the parts come from all over the world.
There will be less regulation on the quality so the meat will be produced less. There can be even GMOs in it.
There will be a higher use of pesticides and chemicals because if you have to produce for the lowest, lowest, lowest cost
there is no guarantee for quality anymore.
They will also see if they want to go to the rural areas that there is no nice rural area anymore
because there will be big industrial farms so it will change the landscape drastically.
The water will be more polluted, soils will degrade so this is also affecting citizens not only on the quality of the food
but also on the quality of rural communities because if there is no income anymore in rural communities
people will have to move to cities where there will be no jobs so it will drastically change our society, the way we live and the way we eat.
