Much ink has been spent in recent months on farmers’ concerns over the EU-Mercosur free trade deal coming into effect. temporarily on Friday after more than two decades of negotiations.
It’s a marked departure from climate concern and calls to save the Amazon, which dominated anti-Mercosur rhetoric when the Green Deal was in vogue. These arguments now appear to have faded, largely confined to a handful of green politicians and long-opposed NGOs and think tanks.
What changed? Was it all political opportunism? Or did the Commission manage to address what once seemed insurmountable sustainability concerns?
The answer is somewhere in between.
The Deforestation Conundrum
French leaders have been at least consistent in their opposition to the deal, moving through counter-arguments from forest conservation to pesticides. The Mercosur deal has become one of the most toxic political issues in France – and a rare issue that cuts across the political spectrum. From left to right, the deal extends.
In the summer of 2019, Macron’s focus associated with the deforestation of the Amazonwhich saw the French president accuses his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro lied about protecting the environment.
Was Macron being honest, or just jumping on the climate bandwagon? Even some of the harshest critics of the agreement, such as Greenpeace, RECEIVED that environmental concern had become politically expedient. 2019 marked the peak of the EU’s own climate ambitions and was the year the Commission unveiled The European Green Deal – Its main plan to reduce emissions by 2050.
If the EU was tightening its own environmental standards, calls for reciprocity from trading partners naturally followed – especially from regions with weaker regulatory frameworks, such as Mercosur.
In this context, the creation of an EU law against deforestation – the EUDR, originally supported by France – seemed to offer a clean solution. By requiring companies to prove that products sold in the EU, from beef to soy, cocoa and coffee, were not linked to deforestation, the law promised to square the circle between trade openness and environmental protection.
In practice, however, the law has struggled to take root. EUDR has faced repeated delays and is embedded in the EU’s wider push for simplification. Privately, many EU insiders also point to flaws in the way the legislation is drafted.
But when it comes to Mercosur, such delays mean the deal will come into effect months before the deforestation law kicks in on December 30. said Green MEP Kai Tegethoff, from the transnational Volt party Euractiv he is concerned about the “enforcement gap” between the two.
“We will effectively allow goods like soya, coffee and cocoa to enter the Union without a rigorous no-deforestation analysis,” he said, urging the Commission not to introduce a further delay.
“Annex”
In addition to specific environmental legislation such as the EUDR, the EU negotiated an additional environmental annex to the Mercosur agreement. The return of Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil in 2023 paved the way for the signing of the agreement with enhanced green guarantees.
Agreed years after the basic text was finalized in 2019, the annex reinforces commitments on deforestation and, crucially, makes the Paris Agreement a core element of the deal.
In practical terms, this means that a future government that reneges on its climate commitments could provide grounds to suspend the agreement.
David Kleimann, a Brussels-based trade expert at the German Institute for Development and Sustainability (IDOS), also noted that the trade pillar now in place also commits parties not to lower environmental standards under a “non-regression” principle.
“The agreement de facto strengthens the Lula administration, which has made the fight against deforestation one of its top political priorities,” Kleimann said.
For some observers, this is not insignificant at all. Irene Mia, senior fellow for Latin America at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, describes the outcome as a “remarkable experiment” in climate diplomacy and claims it could even be “a blueprint” for both future trade deals and “minilateralism” – where a small group of major economies cooperate on specific issues like in traditional multilateral forums.
But even though Mercosur finally looks like a done deal, the criticism hasn’t dissipated. Green politicians and environmental NGOs remain skeptical – even if some have shifted to a more pragmatic tone as the EU seeks to secure new allies in an increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape.
Roderick Kefferpütz, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank linked to Germany’s Green party, acknowledged the tension.
“Geopolitics has not simply trumped climate concerns,” Kefferpütz said. “In a more fragmented global environment, defined by a breakdown of the rules-based global order, it is natural for the balances in this regard to shift and not be set in stone.”
For Kefferpütz, environmental concerns remain “very important”. But, also, ties with Latin America are being strengthened in the current circumstances. Whether the deal lives up to its green billing will ultimately depend on implementation.
“Much will depend on how enforceable these commitments are in practice, how robust the monitoring mechanisms will be and whether there are credible ways to address non-compliance.”
With the provisional application underway, that test begins in earnest.
