The tomato is not just a vegetable. It is employment, it is territory, and it is one of the historical pillars of Spanish and European agriculture. Regions such as Almería, Granada, Murcia, Alicante or the Canary Islands have built an economic and social fabric around this crop, generating hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs. Spain has been for years the leading supplier of tomatoes to the community market. However, today, the Spanish tomato producing and exporting sector is going through one of the most critical situations of recent decades, as a direct consequence of a community trade policy that, far from protecting producers, is favoring clearly unequal competition.
In the last decade, Spanish tomato production for fresh consumption has fallen alarmingly, while exports to the European Union have decreased and imports from Morocco have soared.
In the last ten years, in Spain tomato production for the domestic fresh market has fallen by 33%, going from 2.4 million tons 1.6 million tons in 2025.
Spanish tomato exports to the European Union have fallen by 34%, going from 763,846 tons in 2016 to 502,460 tons in 2025, (excluding the United Kingdom) while Spanish tomato imports from Morocco have grown by 149%, going from 35,727 tons in 2016 to 87,604 tons in 2025.
In the community market, the Spanish presence has been weakening, being replaced as the primary tomato supplier since 2022 by Morocco. Morocco's tomato exports to the EU since 2012, when the agricultural protocol of the Association Agreement came into force and 347,353 tons were exported, has increased to 526,581 tons in 2025, by 52%. In the last ten years, community purchases have gone from 393,937 tons in 2016 to 526,581, 34% more.
Regulatory asymmetry
This setback is not the result of chance nor a lack of competitiveness of the Spanish producer. On the contrary, it occurs in a context in which community farmers are required to comply with increasingly strict —and necessary— labor, social, environmental, and phytosanitary standards, while products imported from third countries access the European market without being subject to those same obligations.
The result is a regulatory asymmetry that generates, in our opinion, unfair competition and that progressively expels the European producer from its own market. Added to this is the questioned effectiveness of control mechanisms. Safeguard clauses included in trade agreements are rarely activated, even when the market shows clear signs of distortion.
Without also mentioning the dichotomies in which the European Commission itself incurs. While in the EU we work for greater water efficiency in crops, in order to respond to the reduction of available water and society's demand for greater sustainability, in Morocco, the EC proposes the opposite, facilitating cultivation in the Sahara which, as we all know, is a desert.
Extension of tariff advantages to the Sahara
The situation has recently worsened because the EC has circumvented, for the benefit of Morocco, two rulings that the EU Court of Justice issued on October 4, 2024, which clearly established that said territory is not part of the Maghreb country.
The CJEU judgment of October 4 relating to joined cases C-779/21 and C-799/21 established the exclusion of tomatoes produced in the Sahara from the tariff advantages included in the EU Association Agreement with Morocco, and the judgment of the same date, relating to case C-399/22 established the obligation to indicate the country of origin or place of provenance of foodstuffs produced in the Sahara, since both rulings considered the Sahara a territory independent of Morocco. Both resolutions were positively assessed by FEPEX since they protected community producers against an unfair situation with dire consequences.
However, the European Commission, in direct negotiation with Morocco, has changed the essence of both rulings. On the one hand, and in relation to the first CJEU ruling, the new Agreement accepts that productions from Western Sahara benefit from the tariff advantages included in the Association Agreement with Morocco, as if they were Moroccan territory.
On the other hand, in relation to the second ruling, to circumvent the obligation for productions from the Sahara to bear this name in the origin labeling, the Commission presented on October 16, 2025, an amendment to Delegated Regulation 2023/2429 on marketing standards for fruits and vegetables that authorizes productions from Western Sahara not to bear this origin indicator and to be labeled with the name of the regions of provenance, in a manner contrary, not only to the ruling of the CJEU judgment, but also to community labeling regulations, which require the country of origin to appear. This amendment was approved by the plenary of the EP on November 26. The European consumer is thus deprived of truthful and transparent information, and basic principles of community law are violated.
From FEPEX we consider especially serious that these decisions have been adopted in an accelerated manner, with little public debate and marginalizing fundamental institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council. The Union's trade policy cannot be built behind the backs of the affected sectors nor ignoring the economic, social, and territorial impact that these decisions have on thousands of producers. In this context, the European Parliament becomes the last democratic guarantee to prevent these decisions from being consolidated.
After the tomato, the rest of the vegetables
What happens with tomatoes anticipates what can happen with other products. According to a working document from the European Commission itself in 2024 on the implementation of the agreement between the EU and the Kingdom of Morocco, the objective of the Moroccan authorities is to increase the irrigated area of Western Sahara by 13,000 hectares, thus allowing agricultural production to increase by more than 1,000%. The impact on tomato production will be enormous, as it would mean going from 87,000 tons produced in 2022 (year analyzed in the EC report) to 957,000 tons in 2030.
But this will not only affect tomatoes but also the rest of vegetables, whose production will also grow, with the community market being their priority destination, in which Spain will be relegated. The trend will mean the lack of economic viability for small farms, the base of important producing regions like Almería, and will inevitably also affect large companies. The consequences, I believe, have not been sufficiently assessed by the authorities, especially the community ones. We will depend more on third countries and lose the much-renowned food sovereignty, which is becoming just a phrase for speeches.
Therefore, from FEPEX we consider that the European Parliament should not ratify the Association Agreement of October. We also consider it essential that European institutions ensure a differentiated customs and control regime for products originating from Western Sahara and prevent EU trade policy from contributing, directly or indirectly, to consolidating a production model based on regulatory asymmetries incompatible with the values and principles of the EU.