The International Trade Committee of the European Parliament has backed a 5% threshold figure for activating safeguards under the EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement.

This figure has changed from between 10% and 5% since the parliament and the Council of the EU began debating the safeguards.

The figure refers to how much prices of products in EU sensitive sectors (including beef) would have to reduce by, as a result of Mercosur imports, before safeguard measures are activated.

Under the safeguard mechanism, the commission originally proposed that an investigation and possible corrective measures would be triggered if the prices of sensitive products in the EU market dropped by 10%; or if the amount of imports from Mercosur increased by 10%.

The parliament countered this proposal by insisting that an investigation must automatically be triggered if there were to be a 5% change.

After trialogue negotiations between the parliament, commission and council, a compromise of 8% was accepted by the commission.

However, when the safeguard proposal went back to the council earlier this month, it voted to back the parliament figure of 5%, in what some sources in Brussels have described as a 'sweetener' to try to sway parliamentarians.

Now, the parliament's committee the oversees trade has also formerly agreed to the 5% figure. The committee voted for the revised proposal by 31 votes to nine with three abstentions.

It is understood that the full parliament will have to vote for the revised proposal in order for it to come into force.

Commenting on the trade committee's vote, Spanish MEP Gabriel Mato, the committee member who leads the safeguards legislative file, said: "The European Parliament has ensured that the safeguards mechanism of the EU-Mercosur agreement is no longer symbolic but genuinely effective.

"We secured a substantial reduction of the activation threshold to 5%, allowing the EU to act before market damage becomes irreversible, and introduced clear price-based criteria to protect farmers against significant price drops," Mato added.

"These safeguards are based on objective indicators and trigger a real obligation to act, backed by stronger monitoring, anti-circumvention measures and rapid activation in just 21 days," the MEP said.

Mato called the agreed proposal a "robust, operational and legally sound instrument".