A group representing EU dairy farmers has criticised the newly signed EU-Australia free trade deal.

The European Milk Board (EMB), which the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA) is a member of, called for "a halt to free trade deals at the expense of producers".

The group said it views the conclusion of the trade deal "critically", and claimed that "once again, agriculture in Brussels is being misused as a bargaining chip to satisfy industrial interests and secure access to raw materials".

"For European milk producers, this deal represents further destabilisation in an already critical market phase," the EMB added.

The organisation is calling or what it called a "fundamental shift" towards leaving agriculture out of "traditional" free trade agreements.

"We need a trade policy that creates stability for producers and short supply chains, instead of putting farmers under price pressure worldwide through unfair deals and forcing them out of production," EMB president Kjartan Poulsen said.

According to the EMB, the trade deal comes at "the wrong time".

"While the European milk market is already back in a crisis and producer prices are under strong pressure, the EU is opening the floodgates to further imports," the group said.

The EMB claimed that a milk market disturbance of 2016 was "exacerbated precisely by attempts to push additional volumes into already saturated markets, an approach that already failed disastrously at the time and does not constitute a viable solution today".

The group called on the European Commission to take 2024's 'Strategic Dialogue' on agriculture seriously, saying trade policy and agricultural policy must go hand in hand, "instead of undermining each other".

"Agricultural reforms must no longer be counteracted by trade agreements. The objective must be a crisis-resilient agricultural sector that guarantees fair producer prices and genuine food sovereignty," the EMB said.

On existing trade deals, the dairy farmer group called for "robust control infrastructure".

"Continuing with mere paper compliance is a distortion of competition to the detriment of our farmers," it said.

"The EMB calls on political decision-makers, in the context of the current EU-Australia agreement, to free agriculture from the logic of 'sell-out'. We need fairness instead of distortion of competition and stability instead of market dumping," the group said.