Brussels’ battle over whether plant-based foods can be sold as “veggie burgers” and “vegan sausages” ended the year in stalemate on Wednesday, after talks between EU countries and the European Parliament collapsed without a deal. French centre-right lawmaker Céline Imart, a grain farmer from southern France and the architect of the naming ban, arrived determined to lock in tough restrictions on plant-based labels, according to three people involved. Her proposal, dismissed as “unnecessary” inside her own political family, was tucked inside a largely unrelated reform of the EU’s farm-market rulebook. It slipped through weeks of talks untouched and unmentioned, only reemerging in the final stretch — by which point even Paul McCartney had asked Brussels to let veggie burgers be. The Wednesday meeting quickly veered off course. Officials said Imart moved to reopen elements of the text that negotiators believed had already wrapped up, including sensitive rules for powerful farm cooperatives. She then sketched out several possible fallbacks on dairy contracts — a politically charged issue for many countries — but without settling on a clear line the rest of the Parliament team could rally behind. “And then she introduced new terms out of nowhere,” one Parliament official said, after Imart proposed adding “liver” and “ham” to the list of protected meat names for the first time. “It was very messy,” another Parliament official said. EU countries, led in the talks by Denmark, said they simply had no mandate to move — not on the naming rules and not on dairy contracts. With neither side giving ground, the discussions ground to a halt. “We did not succeed in reaching an agreement,” Danish Agriculture Minister Jacob Jensen said. Imart insisted that the gap could still be bridged. Dairy contracts and meat-related names “still call for further clarification,” she said in a written statement, arguing that “tangible progress” had been made and that “the prospect of an agreement remains close,” with negotiations due to resume under Cyprus in January. “We did not succeed in reaching an agreement,” Danish Agriculture Minister Jacob Jensen said. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images) Dutch Green lawmaker Anna Strolenberg, who was in the room, said she was relieved: “It’s frustrating that we keep losing time on a veggie burger ban — but at least it wasn’t traded for weaker contracts [for dairy farmers].” For now, that means veggie burgers, vegan nuggets and other alternative-protein products will keep their familiar names — at least until Cyprus picks up the file in the New Year and Brussels’ oddest food fight resumes.

The next time your favorite veggie burger quietly rebrands itself as a “plant-based patty,” you now know who to thank: Céline Imart. The grain farmer from southern France, now a first-term lawmaker in the European Parliament, slipped a ban on meaty names for plant-based, fermented and lab-grown foods into an otherwise technical measure. Inside the Parliament, it caused a minor earthquake. Her own group leader, German conservative Manfred Weber, publicly dismissed it as “unnecessary.” The group’s veteran agriculture voice, Herbert Dorfmann, voted against it. Diplomats from several capitals shrugged it off as “silly” or “just stupid.” And yet, as negotiations with EU governments begin, the amendment that everyone assumed would die in the first round is still standing — not because it has a powerful constituency behind it, but because almost no one is expending political capital to bury it. That alone says something about where Europe’s food politics are drifting. A FIGHT ABOUT MORE THAN LABELS Imart insists the amendment isn’t an attack on innovation, but a gesture of respect toward the farmers she represents. “A steak is not just a shape,” she told POLITICO in an interview. “People have eaten meat since the Neolithic. These names carry heritage. They belong to farmers.” She argues some shoppers genuinely confuse plant-based and meat products, despite years of EU surveys showing consumers largely understand what a “veggie burger” is. Her view, she argues, is shaped by what she hears at home. “Maybe some very intelligent people never make mistakes at the supermarket,” she said, referring to Weber and Dorfmann. “But a lot of people in my region do. They don’t always see the difference clearly.” In rural France, where livestock farming remains culturally central, Imart’s argument resonates. Across Europe, similar anxieties simmer. Farmers say they feel squeezed by climate targets, rising costs and what they see as moralizing rhetoric about “healthy and sustainable diets.” The EU once flirted with promoting alternative proteins as part of its Green Deal ambitions. Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen has spent most of the year soothing farm anger, not pushing dietary change. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images Today, that political moment has mostly waned. References to “protein diversification” appear in draft strategies only to be scrubbed from the final text. Public support remains dwarfed by the billions the Common Agricultural Policy funnels to animal farming each year. Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen has spent most of the year soothing farm anger, not pushing dietary change. This helps explain why an idea dismissed as fringe suddenly doesn’t feel fringe at all. Imart’s amendment taps directly into a broader mood: Defend the farmer first; innovation can wait. BOOM AND BACKLASH The industry caught in the crossfire is no longer niche. Retail sales of meat and dairy alternatives reached an estimated €6-8 billion last year, with Germany alone accounting for nearly €2 billion. Fermentation-based dairy substitutes are attracting investment, and even though cultivated meat isn’t yet authorized in the EU, it has already become a regulatory flash point. But the sector remains tiny beside the continent’s livestock economy, and is increasingly buffeted by political headwinds. After two years of farmer protests and fatigue over climate and environmental reforms, national governments have closed ranks around traditional agriculture. Countries like Austria, Italy and France have warned that novel foods could undermine “primary farm-based production.” Hungary went even further this week, voting to ban the production and sale of cultivated meat altogether. For alternative protein companies, the irony is hard to miss. They see their products as both a business opportunity and part of the solution to the food system’s climate and environmental footprint, most of which comes from animal farming. Yet they say politics are now moving in the opposite direction. “Policymakers are devoting so much attention to unnecessary restrictions that would harm companies seeking to diversify their business,” said Alex Holst of the Good Food Institute Europe, an interest group for plant-based and cultivated alternatives. He argued that familiar terms like “burger” and “sausage” help consumers understand what they’re buying, not mislead them. WHY THE NAMING BAN WON’T DIE The political climate explains why Imart’s idea suddenly resonates. But Brussels lawmaking procedure explains why it might survive. At the negotiating table, national governments are consumed by the Parliament’s more disruptive ideas on market intervention and supply management, changes they fear could distort markets and limit the authorities’ flexibility to act. Compared with those fights, a naming ban barely registers. Especially in an otherwise technical reform of the EU’s Common Market Organisation, a piece of legislation normally reserved for agricultural specialists focused on crisis reserves and market tools. That gives the amendment unusual space. Several diplomats privately complained it sits awkwardly outside the scope of the original European Commission proposal. But not enough to coordinate a pushback. The Commission, meanwhile, has signaled it can “live with” stricter naming rules, having floated narrower limits in its own post-2027 market plan. That removes what might have been the decisive obstacle. Retail sales of meat and dairy alternatives reached an estimated €6-8 billion last year. | Jens Kalaene/Getty Images Even translation quirks, like the fact that “filet,” “filete” and “fillet” can mean different things across languages, haven’t slowed it. Imart shrugged those off: “It’s normal that texts evolve. That’s the point of negotiation.” Whether the naming ban makes it into the final law will depend on the coming weeks. But the fact it is even in contention, after being mocked, dismissed and rejected inside Imart’s own political family, is telling. In today’s Brussels, appeals to heritage and identity land more softly than calls for food system innovation. In that climate, that’s all even a fringe idea needs to survive.

BELÉM, Brazil — Gavin Newsom can’t get out of a meeting or a talk at the international climate talks here without being swarmed by reporters and diplomats eager for a quote, a handshake, a photo. On a tour Tuesday of a cultural center with Gov. Helder Barbalho, the leader of the Brazilian state hosting the talks, a passerby recognized them both. “There’s the governor,” he exclaimed. “And there’s the California governor.” Later in the day, as Newsom rode up an escalator packed with reporters and international officials on his way to deliver a speech, a bystander shouted: “The escalator’s not broken for you!” — a dig at President Donald Trump, who once had an escalator malfunction on him at the United Nations. Newsom grinned wide: “Oh, I like that.” The adulation was gold for a governor with presidential aspirations as he steps into a power vacuum. The Trump administration is trying to dismantle climate policies both at home and abroad, and other likely Democratic presidential contenders are absent from the United Nations climate talks. Seeing a chance to plant his green flag on an international stage, Newsom is embracing the role of climate champion as his own party backs away at home and the politics of the issue shift rightward. It’s a role fitting Newsom’s instincts: anti-Trump, pro-environment and pro-technology, and with a political antenna for the upside of picking fights, finding opportunity in defiance. “We’re at peak influence because of the flatness of the surrounding terrain with the Trump administration and all the anxiety,” he told POLITICO from the sidelines of a green investor conference in Brazil on Monday. Newsom’s profile has never been higher. Just days before traveling to Brazil, he celebrated a decisive win in his redistricting campaign to boost Democrats in the midterms. He is polling at or near the top of presidential primary shortlists, and is amassing an army of small-dollar donors across the states. The governor couldn’t walk down the hallway at the conference without getting swarmed, undeniably the star of the talks on their second formal day. At one point, security officials had to physically shove away one man repeatedly. Conference attendees yelled out “Keep up the social media!” and “Go Gavin!” (and the occasional “Who is that?”). The first question by the Brazilian press: Are you running for president? And from business people: Are you coming back? Yet in touching down here — and in emphasizing his climate advocacy more broadly — Newsom is assuming a significant risk to his post-gubernatorial ambitions. The rest of the world may wish America were more like California, but the country itself — even Democrats who will decide the 2028 primary — are far more skeptical. What looks like courage abroad can read as out-of-touch back home, in a country where voters, including Democrats, routinely rank any number of issues, including the economy, health care, and cost-of-living, as more pressing than global warming. THE STAGE IS SET Other blue states were already backing away from Newsom’s gas-powered vehicle phase-out even before Congress and Trump ended it this summer, and another possible Democratic contender for president, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, may pull his state out of a regional emissions trading market as part of a budget deal, a move seen as tempering attacks from the right on climate. Even in California, where a new Carnegie Endowment for International Peace poll finds that Californians increasingly want their state government to play a bigger role on the international stage, trade trumped climate change as voters’ top priority for international talks for the first time this year. “There’s not a poll or a pundit that suggests that Democrats should be talking about this,” Newsom acknowledged in an interview. “I’m not naive to that either, but I think it’s the way we talk about it that’s the bigger issue, and I think all of us, including myself, need to improve on that and that’s what I aim to do.” In his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden prevailed not after embracing — but rather, distancing himself from — the “Green New Deal,” which Newsom acknowledged this month had become a “pejorative” on the right. Four years later, Trump pilloried Kamala Harris in the general election for her past positions on climate change. Newsom is already facing relentless attacks from the right on energy: two years ago, in what was seen at the time as a shadow presidential debate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was skewering Newsom for his phase-out of gas-powered vehicles: “He is walking his people into a big-time disaster,” DeSantis said. And that was before Republicans began combing Newsom’s social media posts for material to weaponize in future ads. Even Newsom’s predecessor, former Gov. Jerry Brown, who made climate change his signature issue, acknowledged “climate is not the big issue in South Carolina or in Maine or in Iowa.” “Climate is important,” Brown said in an interview. “But it’s not like immigration, it’s not like homelessness, it’s not like taxes, it’s not like inflation, not like the price of a house.” Still, Brown cast climate as an existential issue. “It’s way beyond presidential politics. It is about our survival and your well being for the rest of your life,” he said. “I think he’s doing it because he thinks it’s profoundly important, and certainly politics is not divorced entirely from reality.” Newsom’s inner circle senses a political upside, too. His first-ever visit to the climate talks comes not just from his own or California’s ambitions, but from the vacuum left by Trump. “The more that Trump recedes, like a tide going out, the more coral is exposed. And that’s where Newsom can really flourish,” said Jason Elliott, a former deputy chief of staff and an adviser since Newsom’s early days in elected office. Newsom is “going against the grain,” he continued. “It’s easier to be some of these purple or red state governors in other places in the United States that just wash their hands of EVs the minute that the going gets tough. But that’s just not Newsom.” On climate, Newsom’s attempts to stand alone sit well within the California tradition. Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger — the Democrat and the Republican who preceded him — both made international climate diplomacy central to their legacies. “We have been at this for decades and decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations,” Newsom said. “That’s an important message at this time as well, because we’re so unreliable as a nation, and we’re destroying alliances and relationships.” Also in Brazil for part of the talks were Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, both Democrats, and mayors of several major U.S. cities, like Kate Gallego of Phoenix. But their pitch didn’t land with quite the same heft as California’s, a state filled with billion-dollar tech companies that, as Newsom frequently boasts, recently overtook Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy. He attributed his environmental streak to his family, citing his father, William Newsom, a judge and longtime conservationist. As mayor of San Francisco, Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation composting mandate and plastic bag ban. As lieutenant governor to Brown, Newsom called himself “a solution in search of a problem” because Brown had embraced climate so prominently. But Brown said Newsom has made the issue his own. “I think Newsom comes to this naturally,” he said. Newsom pulls from a wide range of influences; prolific texting buddies include former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who ran for president largely on a climate platform, and former Secretary of State John Kerry. He frequently cites the example of President Ronald Reagan, the Republican — and former California governor — who embraced an environmental agenda. “I talk to everybody,” Newsom said. He spoke in almost spiritual terms about his upcoming trip deeper into the Amazon, where he’s scheduled to meet with community stewards and walk through the forest. “When we were all opening up those first books, learning geography, one of the first places we all learn about is the Amazon,” he said. “It’s so iconic, so evocative, so it informs so much of what inspires us as children to care about the Earth and Mother Nature. It connects us to our creator.” THE MID-TRANSITION HURT As governor, Newsom hasn’t had the luxury his predecessors enjoyed of setting ambitious emissions targets, but instead is working in a period beset by natural disasters and tensions with both the left and moderate wings of his party. His aides have dubbed it the remarkably un-sexy “mid-transition”: The deadlines to show results are here, they’re out of reach — and in the interim, voters are mad about energy prices. As a result, he’s pushed to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035 and directed billions toward wildfire prevention and clean-energy manufacturing — but also reversed past positions against nuclear and Big Oil, including extending the life of California’s last nuclear power plant, pausing a profit cap on refineries and expanding oil drilling in Kern County. Inside the administration, those moves are seen as not a tempering of environmental ambition but a pragmatic recalibration. “We’re transitioning to the other side, and there’s a lot of white water in that. And that’s reality. You’ve got to deal with cards that are dealt,” Newsom said in an interview in São Paulo. But it also exposes him to criticism from both the left and moderate wings of his own party. Newsom’s 2023 speech excoriating oil companies to the United Nations in New York City was one of his proudest moments of his career. This year, he faced banners attacking him: “If you can’t take on Big Oil, can you take on Trump?” At the same time, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, has seized on high gas prices in his campaign to succeed Newsom as governor in 2026 — and is partly blaming past governors’ climate policies. Adding to the crunch are the record-setting wildfires that have beset Newsom’s tenure as governor. They’ve not only devastated communities from Paradise in Northern California to Altadena in Los Angeles County but buoyed both electricity prices as utilities spend billions on fire-proofing their grid and property insurance prices as insurers flee the state. It’s this duality that informs Newsom’s approach. “We’ve got to address costs or we’ll lose the debate,” Newsom said. “This is the hard part.” A business moderate known to hand out personal phones programmed with his number to tech CEOs, Newsom is now pitching his climate fight as one focused on economic competitiveness and jobs. Lauren Sanchez, the chair of the state’s powerful air and climate agency, the California Air Resources Board, called the state’s international leadership the governor’s “north star” on climate change. “He is in the business of ensuring that California is relevant in the future economy,” she said. In Brazil, Newsom made the time to stop by a global investors summit in São Paulo, where he held an hour-long roundtable with green bankers, philanthropists and energy execs. They told him they wanted his climate pacts with Brazilian governments to do more on economic ties. So, Newsom said, he started drafting a new agreement there and then, throwing a paper napkin on the table in reference to the cocktail napkin deal that formed Southwest. “Let’s get this done before I leave,” Newsom said he told his Brazilian counterparts. “We move quickly.” If the moment reflected California’s swagger, it also laid bare its limitations. The Constitution limits states from contributing money to international funds, like the tropical rainforest preservation fund that is the Brazilians’ signature proposal at the talks. And even at home, Trump is still making Newsom’s balancing act hard: Newsom floated backfilling the Trump administration’s removal of electric vehicle incentives with state rebates, then backtracked, conceding the state doesn’t have enough funds. And on Tuesday, reports came out that the Trump administration was planning to offer offshore oil and gas leases for the first time in decades off the coast of California — putting Newsom on the defensive. Newsom called those plans “dead on arrival.” “I also think it remarkable that he didn’t promote it in his backyard at Mar-a-Lago; he didn’t promote it off the coast of Florida,” Newsom added.

The European Commission refused to rule out taking legal action against three countries that are keeping their unilateral import bans on Ukrainian goods. Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are openly defying efforts to reset trade relations as a revised trade deal with Kyiv kicks in. The bans, covering Ukrainian grain and other farm products, breach EU single market rules that prohibit national trade barriers. The defiance underscores how politically fraught the EU’s trade relationship with Ukraine has become, with capitals essentially daring Brussels to prioritize Kyiv over EU members to enforce the trade pact. “We see no justification for maintaining these national measures,” Commission Deputy Spokesperson Olof Gill said Thursday, a day after a new European Union trade agreement meant to address EU members’ concerns about negative impacts from a flow of Ukrainian imports took effect. In an email, Gill said the EU executive would “intensify its contact” with the intransigent capitals. Pressed on whether the Commission had ruled out launching infringement proceedings, Gill replied: “All options are on the table.” Brussels has been reluctant to act since the bans were introduced in 2023, hoping the updated trade deal would make them redundant. Officials familiar with the talks say politics are also playing a part. Taking Poland to court could strain relations with Donald Tusk’s pro-EU government, while singling out Hungary and Slovakia would look like a double standard. Poland’s agriculture ministry told POLITICO earlier this week that the government’s restrictions “do not automatically lift” under the new EU deal and remain in force.  Likewise, Budapest will maintain its national-level protection, Hungary’s Agriculture Minister István Nagy said, while accusing Brussels of “prioritizing Ukrainian interests.” His Slovak counterpart, Richard Takáč, called the new deal’s safeguards “not strong enough” to protect local producers, suggesting Bratislava will follow suit. The bans, covering Ukrainian grain and other farm products, breach EU single market rules that prohibit national trade barriers. | Ukrinform/Getty Images The updated agreement, approved by EU countries on Oct. 13, replaces the temporary trade liberalization introduced after Russia’s 2022 invasion, providing a more stable framework for Ukrainian exports while adding safeguards for European farmers. This story has been updated.

LONDON — Britain’s technocratic ministers aren’t the most obvious candidates to don MAGA-style red caps and belt out punchy slogans. But Britain’s housing secretary has a real fight on his hands, and he’s not afraid to channel Donald Trump in waging it. Steve Reed took office in early September with a colorful promise to “build, baby, build.” Britain is in the midst of a housing crisis. The availability of affordable housing has plummeted, Brits are getting on the housing ladder later in life, and many families and renters are living in overcrowded, substandard and insecure homes. To try to fix this, the government came to power promising to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of the parliament. Reed and his team went into this fall’s Labour conference wearing hats emblazoned with the Trump-style three-word phrase, a rabble-rousing address and a social media strategy to match. But his MPs are already worried that the tradeoffs Reed and the U.K. Treasury are pushing to get shovels in the ground ride roughshod over the environmental protections that Brits cherish — and put some vulnerable Labour seats at risk. The three-word slogan is “completely counterproductive,” said one Labour MP who was granted anonymity to speak candidly like others quoted in this piece. The government must acknowledge “that nature is something that people genuinely love, [which] improves health and wellbeing.” PLANNING BATTLE Front of their minds are a host of changes to the U.K.’s planning bill, which is snaking its way through parliament. The bill aims to cut red tape to fast-track planning decisions, unlock more land for development, and create a building boom.  The legislation is on a journey through the U.K.’s House of Lords, and has been tweaked with a slew of government amendments on its way. In October, Reed introduced further amendments to try to speed up planning decisions and overrule councils who attempt to block new developments.  But the first MP quoted above said they are concerned Reed’s “build, baby, build” drive will only see Labour shed votes to both Zack Polanski’s left-wing Green Party and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform. The government announced that the quotas for affordable housing in new London developments would be slashed from 35 percent to 20 percent. | Richard Baker/Getty Images “Making tough decisions about how we use our land for important purposes, such as energy, food, security, housing and nature, is what government is about,” the first MP said. But they added: “We need to make sure that we are making the right decisions, but also telling a story about why we’re making those decisions, and dismissing nature as inconvenient is going against the grain of the British public.” They added: “Nobody disagrees with [building more homes] as a principle, but ending up with a narrative that basically sounds like you’re speaking in support of the [housing] developers, rather than in support of the communities that we represent, is just weird.” MAKING CHANGES Last week, Reed opened up another front in his battle. The government announced that the quotas for affordable housing in new London developments would be slashed from 35 percent to 20 percent. City Hall said the measures would help speed up planning decisions and incentivize developers to actually build more houses. But cutting social housing targets is an uncomfortable prospect for many in the Labour party.   The government’s message is “build, baby build — but not for poor people,” a Labour aide complained.  Reed firmly defended the change, telling Sky News last week: “There were only 4,000 starts in London last year for social and affordable housing. That is nothing like the scale of the crisis that we have.” He added of the quota: “35 percent of nothing is nothing. We need to make schemes viable for developers so they’ll get spades in the ground.” BLOCKING THE BLOCKERS NARRATIVE Reed has the backing of the U.K.’s powerful Treasury in waging his battle. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the government wants to back the “builders not the blockers,” language a second Labour MP, this one in a rural seat, described as “terrible” and an approach that “needs to stop.” Such rhetoric will fail to persuade constituents worried about new developments that trample nature to support new housing. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” they warned. “It’s all vinegar.” The government has already shown that it’s willing to take the fight to pro-environment MPs — sometimes dismissed in the U.K. as “NIMBYs,” short for “not in my backyard.” Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the government wants to back the “builders not the blockers.” | Pool Photo by Joe Giddens via Getty Images 2024 intake MP Chris Hinchliff was stripped of the Labour whip in July after proposing a series of rebel amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and attacking the legislation for having a “narrow focus on increasing housing supply.” While there is vocal opposition to the “build, baby, build” strategy within Labour, there are also MPs who align themselves with the general message, if not the exact wording. “I would not go out to my constituents who are concerned about the Green Belt wearing a [build, baby, build] cap,” said a third Labour MP, also in a rural seat, “but at the same time, you have to be honest with people about the trade-offs.” They accused the opposition to Reed of “fear-mongering” and stoking the idea that England’s green belt — a designated area of British countryside protected from most development — risks being “destroyed.”  “That has killed off responsible discussions on development,” they argued. “Do I love the slogan? No. Am I going to lose sleep over it? No, because as a constituency MP you can have reasonable conversations.” THE RED HAT BRIGADE Reed also has a cohort of willing warriors on his side. The 2024 intake of Labour MPs brought with it some highly vocal, pro-growth Labour factions. The Labour YIMBY group and Labour Growth Group have been shouting from the rooftops about building more. Labour Growth Group chair and MP Chris Curtis says: “We have some of the oldest and therefore coldest homes of any developed country. We have outdated, carbon intensive energy infrastructure, hardly any water storage, pipes that leak, old sewage infrastructure that dumps raw sewage into our rivers, and car dependency because we can’t build proper public transport.  “Anybody who thinks blocks on building has been good for nature is simply wrong,” he added. “Protecting our environment literally depends on us building well, and building quickly.” Labour MP Mike Reader, who worked in the construction and infrastructure sector before becoming an MP and is part of the pro-building caucus, was sanguine about Reed’s message. “The U.K. is the most nature-depleted country in Western Europe,” he said. “So to argue for the status quo … is arguing for us to destroy nature in its very essence. The legislation that we [currently] have does not protect nature.” As for concern that the government is too close to housing developers, Reader shot back: “Who do they think builds the houses?” Steve Reed introduced further amendments to try to speed up planning decisions and overrule councils who attempt to block new developments. | Aaron Chown/Getty Images “I want each [MP who rejects the ‘build, baby, build’ message] to tell the thousands of young families in temporary accommodation that they don’t deserve a safe secure home,” he said. “If they can’t do that they need to grow a pair and do difficult things. That’s why we’re in government. To change lives. And build, baby, build.” A fourth unnamed Labour MP said the slogan is “a bit cringe and Trumpian,” but added: “I’m not really arsed about what slogans they’re using if they’re delivering on that as an objective.” There’s also unlikely praise for the effort from the other side of the U.K. political divide. Jack Airey, a former No. 10 special adviser who tried to get a planning and infrastructure bill through under the last Conservative government, said “people that oppose house building often have the loudest voice, and they use it … and yet, the people that support house building generally don’t really say it, because why would they? They’ve got better things to do.” “I think it’s really positive for the government to have a pro-house building and pro-development message out there, and, more importantly, a pro-development caucus in parliament and beyond,” he said. In a bid to steady the nerves of anxious MPs, Reed told the parliamentary Labour Party last week that his Trump-style slogan is a “bit of fun” that hides a serious point — that there simply aren’t enough houses being built in the U.K. And an aide to Reed rejected concerns from Labour MPs that nature is not being sufficiently considered, saying “nobody understands [nature concerns] more than Steve. “We reject this kind of binary choice between nature and building,” they said. “We think that you can do both. It just requires imaginative, ultimately sensible and pragmatic policy-making, and that’s what we’re doing. “We’re not ashamed to campaign in primary colors,” the Reed aide said. Noah Keate contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — Donald Trump’s tariffs have stung both the EU and India into mounting a big push to get their long-delayed trade deal over the line — fast.   Brussels and New Delhi only have three months left to deliver on their joint pledge to seal a deal by the end of the year — with the toughest issues related to agriculture and sustainability yet to be resolved.   Despite unprecedented political will, policymakers and experts alike recognize it won’t be an easy run to the finish line.   “The negotiations remain extremely challenging,” the EU’s lead negotiator Christophe Kiener told European lawmakers last week. “It was absolutely expected that when we start negotiating on the most difficult issues, the most sensitive areas, it would not be easy.”   As crunch time approaches, with another round of talks scheduled for next week, here are five things to know:  1. There’s renewed appetite on both sides — thanks to Trump.  Spurred by Trump’s tariff crusade, which hit Indian imports with tariffs as high as 50 percent and didn’t spare the EU either — albeit with a lower rate of 15 percent on most goods — both sides are frantically hunting for alternative trade partners.  “When we knew Trump would come into office, Delhi started sending smoke signals to capitals across Europe saying: We are serious about trade and we want to make this work to hedge against the uncertainties of tariffs and the U.S.’s commerce-first approach,” said Garima Mohan, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who leads the think tank’s work on India.  Roger that, said Brussels.   Taking her whole College of Commissioners to India a few weeks into Trump’s second mandate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to seal a deal by the end of the year — something even they recognized would be a steep target.   “It will not be easy. But I also know that timing and determination counts, and that this partnership comes at the right moment for both of us,” von der Leyen said at the time.   The EU has been on a negotiation roll, revamping its pact with Mexico, and concluding talks with the South American bloc of Mercosur countries and with Indonesia.   2. The two have a complicated trade history.  While India is playing hard to get, it is nonetheless seeking to overcome some of its protectionist instincts, deepening ties with Japan and negotiating a deal with Australia. A deal with the EU, its second-largest trading partner, remains a key objective. But historically, their trade relationship has never been easy.   “I know from experience how difficult India can be, how difficult it is to strike the final deal on the more sensitive issues. I suspect that that’s where we are now,” said Ignacio García Bercero, the EU’s chief negotiator for India until 2013. That’s when talks went into snooze mode over thorny issues such as India’s agricultural protectionism and its generic pharmaceuticals. They were relaunched at India’s request in 2022.   Although negotiators stress things are different this time around, they can’t escape sometimes conflicting economic approaches given India’s protectionist history.   “If we look at what is left, it’s the most important stuff … those are exactly the same things that we were dealing with in 2012, 2013, when the negotiations derailed last time,” said Nicolas Köhler-Suzuki, associate researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute.  3. Ukraine isn’t making things any easier.  While Brussels is counting on India for its diversification push, it won’t find it easy to remain a credible threat to Russia while doing more business with a country that maintains historically close ties with Moscow.  An EU official, granted anonymity to discuss closed-door discussions, conceded “one of the biggest issues where [the EU and India] have differences is Ukraine.”  The world’s most populous country sent 65 troops this month to join Russia’s annual Zapad military exercise, in which the Kremlin simulated a nuclear attack on NATO countries. At a recent summit in China, Modi held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they approached their host, President Xi Jinping.  At a recent summit in China, Narendra Modi held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin as they approached their host, President Xi Jinping. | Pool photo by Suo Takekuma via AFP/Getty Images Trump, meanwhile, is calling on the EU to hit New Delhi with tariffs as high as 100 percent for enabling Russia’s war in Ukraine.   “It’s not all joyous music and singing and dancing. There is an acknowledgement that we need to do more to bridge gaps where they are,” the official said, referring to a communication on India the EU executive put out in mid-September.  Ultimately, by engaging with India, the intention is to ensure the gap left by the U.S. isn’t filled by other, politically hostile, powers.  For India, giving up its ties to Russia is a no-go, as that would constitute a major concession to China, India’s long-standing Asian rival.   “The Russia-China factor is a huge concern for India,” said Mohan.  4. There’s a bunch of tricky technical bits.   Aside from the geopolitics, divergences are also creeping up in a host of nitty-gritty areas.   For one, there are long-standing disagreements on cars and car parts, wines and spirits, and other agricultural products. Earlier this year, the two sides agreed to set aside particularly sensitive agricultural sectors, such as dairy and sugar, to facilitate the talks.   On top of that come other issues related to agriculture, such as sanitary and phytosanitary measures. The EU also takes issue with the Indian Quality Control Orders, which prescribe that certain products must conform to Indian standards before being sold there.  Sustainability provisions and the EU’s green agenda are also complicating the negotiations.   “India had been clear from the outset that it did not particularly like the way the European Union wants to link sustainability-related issues and trade, but they’ve obviously accepted that we will need to have a chapter on this,” said Kiener, the EU negotiator.   However, New Delhi still takes issue with making the Trade and Sustainable Development chapter binding and enforceable through a dispute settlement mechanism. It has also threatened to retaliate against the EU’s carbon border tax, as POLITICO reported earlier this year. “The carbon border adjustment mechanism that the EU has visualized does not meet the test of fair play,” Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said then.   If that wasn’t enough, a historical issue has also cropped up in the talks: An India-Pakistan dispute over the two countries’ rival claims to basmati rice. New Delhi is pressuring the EU to designate the grain Indian — but if Brussels does so, it risks a rift with Pakistan.  In short, sealing the agreement will likely entail a trade-off between the political benefits of a fast deal against the economic gains of a potentially more comprehensive agreement.   5. They are a temperature check of the EU’s trade priorities.   Ultimately, the deal will be a test of just how much of its (green) trade ambitions the EU is willing to sacrifice on the altar of geopolitics.   Considering Trump’s attempts to upend or at least significantly harm the rules-based trade order, calls have been growing for the EU to be more pragmatic and aim for quicker and less comprehensive deals.   But not everyone agrees that will ultimately be beneficial in the long-term.   “We hope that the result of the trade negotiations will be a commercially meaningful agreement,” Angelika Niebler of the European People’s Party, chair of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with India, said in Parliament’s trade committee last week.   The India deal will also reveal just how important the bloc deems its aim to advance the bloc’s environmental agenda through trade deals.   “Clearly, India has [a] different geopolitical alignment, and they have always been somewhat closer to the Russia operation,” said García Bercero, the former EU negotiator who now works for the Bruegel think tank.   “But at the end of the day, I don’t think that this would need to be an obstacle to concluding an agreement.” 

KYIV — The drone struck just after sunrise. Oleksandr Hordiienko, a 58-year-old farmer from Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, was driving across his war-scarred fields when the Russian munition slammed into his car. At his funeral in Odesa in early September, mourners called him “the farmer with a shotgun,” a defiant hero who resisted occupation for three years. He cleared thousands of mines from the 1,000 hectares his cooperative shared with a dozen other farmers and patrolled the skies with a Turkish shotgun and jerry-rigged electronics to protect his workers from drones. For Ukraine’s farmers, his death symbolized the resilience of the men and women who continue to produce grain, milk and potatoes under fire. For Europe it was a reminder that the “Ukrainian farmer” is not just an agribusiness boss controlling vast swathes of land, but also includes men like Hordiienko, fighting to protect their land with a shotgun. Across the EU, such nuance is often lost. Hostility to Ukraine’s mega farms and their ability to drown Europe in highly competitive exports has often shifted the bloc’s politics against Kyiv, despite the war. Ukraine’s vast expanses of highly fertile “black earth” have long made it the “breadbasket of Europe” — something many in the EU see as a threat. In Poland, farmers’ border blockades over Ukrainian grain imports have soured public opinion on Kyiv’s war efforts. In Hungary, ministers have cast Ukraine’s accession to the bloc as a threat to EU farm subsidies, warning that money meant for European farmers risks being siphoned away. And in France, President Emmanuel Macron moved last year to join Poland in pushing for tighter quotas on Ukrainian cereals to appease his own restive farmers. Behind all of this looms the image of Ukrainian farm giants and oligarch-owned holdings — MHP, Kernel, UkrLandFarming — that are big enough to rival the agri powerhouses of Brazil or Argentina. These few dozen companies dominate Ukraine’s exports and have become the face of the country’s agriculture in Europe, looming as an existential threat at the border. The reality on the ground in Ukraine is more complex, and includes tens of thousands of smaller commercial farms and millions of households who have kept the country fed throughout the war. LEAVING WAS NOT AN OPTION Akhmil Alkhadzhi, whose father came from Syria, runs a family company that cultivates 3,500 hectares. In Europe that would be a mega-farm; in Ukraine, it’s considered middling. He built it from scratch, starting with just 20 hectares in the 1990s and expanding steadily with his wife. When Russia invaded, wheat prices collapsed to $70 a ton from $250 to $300 before the war, and sunflower seeds plunged to barely $110 per ton from about $600 to $650. To keep the business alive, Alkhadzhi sold his apartment abroad. “We stayed without an apartment, but with a business,” he said. He employs 60 workers — “that’s 300 or 400 lives depending on us.” Hostility to Ukraine’s mega farms and their ability to drown Europe in highly competitive exports has often shifted the bloc’s politics against Kyiv, despite the war. | Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images The war was only part of the challenge. Droughts have cut his wheat yields from 6 or 7 tons to just 2 tons per hectare, and with banks demanding interest rates of over 20 percent he has had to improvise, renting low-till machinery to conserve water before scraping together enough to upgrade. Climate change is pushing him toward sustainability choices even without EU rules.  Yet leaving was never an option. “Three days before the war, my family said if Russians come close, we will go. But when it started, no one left. We stayed. We were more needed here.” CHAMPAGNE AND COMBINE HARVESTERS A day before Hordiienko’s death, Alkhadzhi found himself among the guests at a very different kind of gathering. At an elite yacht club on the southern edge of Kyiv, prosecco sprayed from a fountain as a live band played pop classics. European diplomats mingled with Ukrainian ministry officials and the owners of some of the country’s largest farms. This was a reception hosted by UCAB, Ukraine’s biggest agribusiness lobby, providing a gilded day of meaty dishes, strong spirits and relentless networking. The spectacle was as much about politics as farming, a show of survival, clout and ambition after three years of war. Even Ukraine’s agri barons have been battered, losing swathes of leased land and infrastructure to occupation and bombardment. Yet they remain global players, with balance sheets and export volumes big enough to compete on world markets. What many farmers in Poland or France fear is the scale of these companies and the possibility that Ukrainian grain or poultry could undercut them. Anton Zhemerdeev, a brisk, fresh-faced manager at TAS Agro, shrugged when asked about those fears. His company controls 80,000 hectares across five Ukrainian regions — a number so outlandish in EU terms that it borders on science fiction. The average European farm is just 17 hectares. “Eighty thousand hectares is big, yes,” he said with a grin, “but we don’t sell everything to Europe.” Much of TAS Agro’s grain heads to Asia and the Middle East. The EU, he argued, is just one market among many. But unlike Asia, it is also a political one, with borders that can slam shut overnight and quotas that shift with the political winds.  When Poland closed its border in 2023, Ukraine’s harvest was redirected to the Romanian port of Constanța instead. “Poland missed the chance to modernize. Romania took it,” he said, referring to investments in ports and railways that captured the trade. Another producer at the yacht club, Ihor Shyliuk, whose Cygnet Agrocompany runs 30,000 hectares and a sugar factory in western Ukraine, fumed at the European Commission’s tight quotas. Serbia, he noted, enjoys bigger export allowances to the EU than does Ukraine, even though it’s a fraction of its size. “Why is our sugar quota smaller than Moldova’s?” he also asked. “Politics, not economics.” Those quotas are due to improve under a deal struck between the Commission and Kyiv over the summer, though Shyliuk remained skeptical, arguing that politics will continue to outweigh economics in the EU’s farm trade. The presence of these giants and medium-sized players is exactly what makes Ukraine’s EU bid so sensitive. In Poland, farmers’ border blockades over Ukrainian grain imports have soured public opinion on Kyiv’s war efforts. | Andriy Andriyenko/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Kyiv formally applied for EU membership days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, and has since begun accession talks that promise to be lengthy and fraught. Agriculture looms especially large because farm products are one of Ukraine’s biggest exports and trade in them is already a contentious issue, pitting Kyiv against the EU’s powerful farm lobbies and the national governments that back them. OVERLOOKED MILLIONS Step away from the yacht club and the massive combine harvesters, however, and yet another Ukraine comes into view. Alongside Ukraine’s farm giants are tens of thousands of registered family farms, typically 50–100 hectares in size, selling into domestic markets and anchoring local rural economies. Nearly 4 million households also work the land, cultivating over 6 million hectares. Many tend only a hectare or two, but together they produce 95 percent of the country’s potatoes, 85 percent of its vegetables, 80 percent of its fruit and berries and three-quarters of its milk. Together, these farms and plots are the backbone of Ukraine’s food security, yet they are often invisible in the debate. During the war, many families have relied almost entirely on their own milk, potatoes and chickens. For some, farming is not just a business, but a lifeline. That lopsided map of Ukraine’s agriculture — comprising towering agriholdings at one end and millions of smaller farms and household plots at the other— was drawn long before the war. It’s the legacy of Soviet collectivization and the land reforms that followed, a process that left families with small parcels and allowed companies to lease and consolidate those remnants into today’s sprawling estates. The top 10 holdings each control hundreds of thousands of hectares. But without the smallholders, Ukraine’s villages would have starved long ago. The debate in Brussels often overlooks this complexity, even if the fears of European farmers about the overall size of Ukraine are not unfounded. Ukraine’s largest farms operate on a scale incomprehensible in Europe, with vertical integration and global reach. Their land runs into the hundreds of thousands of hectares. They can produce wheat cheaper than anyone in the EU. Corruption scandals have fed suspicions, from ministers accused of seizing state land to regional officials caught taking bribes for quarantine certificates. But the fixation on oligarchs obscures a more complicated reality. The debate in Brussels reduces Ukraine to a threat — vast, deregulated, and impossible to absorb without crushing EU farmers. Yet for every holding with a yacht club cocktail reception, there are thousands of family farms adapting to EU rules, millions of households growing potatoes in backyards, and many farmers like Hordiienko, fighting and dying in the fields. The war has also nudged Ukraine’s farm economy to adapt. With ports under attack and borders often restricted, producers are putting more focus on processed goods such as sunflower oil, poultry and sugar, which already make up nearly half of agri-food exports. For Zhemerdeev of TAS Agro, even 80,000 hectares is just one part of a bigger picture. What matters, he insisted, is that Ukraine’s fields are not just symbols of geopolitical competition. They are home to people — some rich, some struggling, some heroic — all bound by the same stubborn conviction: “The land is worth fighting for.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reiterated EU calls for Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, as health workers warned Palestinians were facing “forced starvation.” “The images from Gaza are unbearable,” von der Leyen said. “Civilians in Gaza have suffered too much, for too long. It must stop now.” In 24 hours, 15 people — including four children — died of starvation, Gaza’s health ministry said Tuesday morning. The latest deaths bring the total figures, according to local hospitals, to 101 people in Gaza, including 80 children, who have died from hunger since the start of the war. Israel has blocked most aid from entering Gaza since March, with the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation taking over its distribution since May. At least 1,000 people have been killed seeking food from GHF and aid convoys since then, the U.N. Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) estimates. Israel has previously disputed the number of casualties. “The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible,” EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Tuesday, noting she spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to “make clear the [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points.” Kallas and von der Leyen’s statements come as foreign ministers across Europe and the Commonwealth area accused Israel of denying assistance to the civilian population in Gaza in a joint statement on Monday. Twenty EU countries, alongside the U.K., Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid Hadja Lahbib signed on to the statement. In a post on X, Sa’ar said the countries behind the statement had made a “mistake … part of them out of good intentions and part of them out of an obsession against Israel.” Sa’ar added he had spoken to Kallas and told her Hamas was responsible for “deliberately creating friction between the civilian population, the aid distribution centers and the IDF.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot also demanded on Tuesday that Israel let journalists into Gaza, a day after the journalists’ association at newswire Agence France-Presse said their colleagues in Gaza were starving to death. HEALTH CRISIS SPIRALS “This is not hunger, this is not malnutrition. This is forced starvation, this is torture,” Saira Hussain, a British-Australian doctor currently working in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, said. “We’ve really not seen anything quite like this before,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and an expert on famine. “It’s genocidal starvation.” On July 10, Kallas announced a deal with Israel to increase the flow of humanitarian aid, saying Israel agreed to open more aid crossings and let more food trucks into Gaza. But these measures aren’t sufficient to reverse the humanitarian crisis, de Waal warned. “Think of this as a slide into mass starvation … they’re not addressing the downward slide, they’re just addressing the velocity.” According to aid workers and health care professionals on the ground, the situation has turned increasingly desperate. “I walked through the market yesterday searching for food, but sadly returned empty-handed. There isn’t a single grain of flour to be found,” said Mai Elawawda, a spokesperson for NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza.  Health workers in Gaza report being overwhelmed with mass casualty incidents from the aid centers. On Saturday, there were “hundreds and hundreds of wounded” brought in with gunshot injuries from a GHF site, Hussain said. Children with burn injuries and chronic diseases are suffering the most from the lack of food, Hussain said: “If you’re malnourished, your tissues don’t heal … All children suffer here, but when you think of the children who also have chronic conditions and chronic diseases that would be easily treatable in any other country, the situation is absolutely intolerable.” Newborn babies are also struggling to survive as malnourished mothers cannot breastfeed, said Graeme Groom, a British orthopedic surgeon who returned from his most recent trip to Gaza in June. “There is some formula milk for normal babies, but the lactose-intolerant babies just die,” he said. Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission announced Monday it had reached an agreement with Ukraine to update their existing free trade agreement, granting Kyiv improved market access compared to pre-war terms, though not fully restoring wartime trade liberalization measures. The deal marks a significant reprieve for Ukraine, which continues to resist Russian aggression more than three years after President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion. Earlier this month, Ukraine lost emergency trade waivers granted by Brussels early in the war. “Today’s agreement in principle is balanced, fair and realistic. It represents the best possible outcome under difficult geopolitical conditions,” EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told a news conference. “Politically, this is a strong signal of support to Ukraine as it defends its sovereignty and democratic future. And crucially, it is also a response to concerns voiced by our member states, farmers and food producers.” The revised deal, which confirms an earlier report by POLITICO, builds on the existing EU-Ukraine free trade agreement but updates it to reflect lessons from the war.  Ukraine has committed to continue aligning its farming standards with EU rules — a process already underway as part of its path to membership. Full alignment is expected by 2028, including in areas like animal welfare and pesticide use.  The deal also allows either side to curb imports if they cause serious market disruption. And while Ukraine won’t regain the blanket tariff-free access it enjoyed during the war, the new terms raise quotas for many products that weren’t previously liberalized, while keeping tighter limits on a narrow list of politically sensitive goods like sugar, poultry, eggs and wheat. Ukraine’s top trade negotiator Taras Kachka described the outcome as “a really good deal,” telling POLITICO the level of liberalization secured in the agreement will allow Ukraine to maintain wartime trade volumes, with only a few exceptions.  “We actually follow EU standards — and we started this not today but 15 years ago,” Kachka said, adding that the agreement helps show Ukraine is “a predictable trade partner” and lays the groundwork for deeper economic integration. The agreement follows months of tense negotiations and uncertainty for Ukrainian exporters. The EU’s temporary wartime measures had initially lifted tariffs on all Ukrainian products, but later reinstated caps on sensitive agricultural goods. When these Autonomous Trade Measures (ATMs) lapsed on June 6, the Commission introduced a hasty interim solution, snapping back quotas to pre-war levels and sparking a scramble among Ukrainian exporters to move goods before hitting the ceiling. BRIDGES OF RESILIENCE European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the agreement, saying in a statement it will build “bridges of resilience and economic solidarity in the face of Russia’s unjustified war of aggression.” The deal would safeguard the interests of European farmers, while embedding Ukraine as part of the European family, she said in a statement: “We remain committed to a path of mutual growth and stability, leading to its full integration in our Union.” Ukrainian exports to the EU have surged since Russia’s full-scale invasion, bolstered by the wartime suspension of tariffs. That liberalization helped offset Kyiv’s wartime losses, but triggered a political backlash in frontline EU countries, where farmers blame cheap Ukrainian goods for undercutting prices. A patchwork of national bans and licensing systems remains in place in countries like Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.  Following Monday’s agreement at political level, both sides will work to fine tune its technical elements, the Commission said, with EU member countries and the European Parliament to be briefed in the coming days. Subject to hammering out a final legal text, both sides will proceed with formally endorsing the update to the existing trade agreement. On the EU side, the deal would need to be endorsed by the Council, representing EU member countries. It would then be formally adopted by the EU-Ukraine Association Committee. This story has been updated.