{"id":373890,"date":"2026-01-16T20:03:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T20:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/373890\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:03:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T20:03:11","slug":"greek-rice-growers-fear-mercosur-deal-will-price-them-out-of-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/373890\/","title":{"rendered":"Greek rice growers fear Mercosur deal will price them out of business"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Greek<\/p>\n

Piles of harvested rice of the Chalastra Rice Producers Agricultural Cooperative are seen inside the cooperative’s warehouses in Chalastra, Thursday. [Alexandros Avramidis\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

CHALASTRA \u2013 Rice growers in northern Greece had braced for a tough 2026 season as competition from non-EU exporters heated up but many of them now worry that a controversial free trade deal between the European Union and South America\u2019s biggest Mercosur economies might put them out of business for good. Greece, Europe\u2019s third largest producer of paddy rice behind Italy and Spain, is exporting most of its 240,000-ton annual production, mainly to Europe and Turkey. But \u2060its rice producers have felt the pinch \u200dof rising production costs and droughts in recent years and joined nationwide protests with other farmers who have blockaded Greek roads for weeks over delayed EU aid.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot sell because they are bringing a lot \u200cof rice from Asian countries and we\u2019re already having trouble,\u201d said Menelaos Koukourdis, who grows rice across 450 acres of land in a fertile river \u200cplain outside the northern city of \u200cThessaloniki, Greece\u2019s main \u200crice-growing region.<\/p>\n

Koukourdis now sells at 25 cents per kilo, half the price from a year ago. \u201cNow that they will also bring rice from Mercosur, from South America, we\u2019ll have to abandon everything,\u201d he said. Under the EU-Mercosur trade pact \u2013 which was approved by \u2060Greece and other EU states last week and is due to be signed on Saturday \u2013 \u00a0Europe will import 60,000 tons of duty-free rice from South America\u2019s Mercosur, comprising Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, over five years.<\/p>\n

The European \u2060Commission says the quantities are equal to a fraction of the annual consumption in Europe which relies on rice imports for about half of its needs.<\/p>\n

Greece also defended the deal, saying it will \u200cgive many of its products, including the trademark \u201cfeta\u201d cheese and mastic, access to a population of 270 million and will come with safeguards in the event of import spikes.<\/p>\n

Feeling \u200cthe pressure, many rice growers have \u200dabandoned their fields and machinery to look for other jobs, said Christos Gatzaras, a 52-year-old farmer and head of the Chalastra cooperative\u2019s rice producers near Thessaloniki.<\/p>\n

For Koukourdis, who has lowered prices despite higher production \u2060costs \u200dto \u200bbe able to compete with cheaper imported rice, switching crops \u200dwill not be easy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have no room to sow anything else in these fields, \u200bin this area. Rice used to be a monoculture,\u201d he said. [Reuters]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Piles of harvested rice of the Chalastra Rice Producers Agricultural Cooperative are seen inside the cooperative’s warehouses in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":373891,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[5083,84,1294,2692,443,426,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-373890","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-agriculture","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-farmers","12":"tag-protest","13":"tag-trade","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/373891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}