EU member states’ representatives (Coreper) confirmed today the provisional deal reached earlier on the same day between the Council presidency and the European Parliament representatives to renew the suspension of import duties and quotas on Ukrainian exports to the EU until 5 June 2025. At the same time, the EU has decided to reinforce the protection of sensitive agricultural products by beefing up safeguards already included in the currently applicable autonomous trade measures, which includes taking into account any adverse impact on the market of one or several member states, rather than just on the EU market as a whole (as is the case now). A new automatic safeguard will also be added for certain sensitive products, such as poultry, eggs, sugar, oats, maize, groats and honey. The regulation will also include two safeguard mechanisms to protect the EU market: a strengthened version of the existing mechanism, which will apply on the basis of regular monitoring, allowing the Commission to impose any measure provided that specific conditions are met; a new, automatic safeguard mechanism which will oblige the Commission to reintroduce tariff-rate quotas if imports of poultry, eggs, sugar, oats, maize, groats and honey exceed the arithmetic mean of quantities imported in the second half of 2021, 2022 and 2023.