Eurasia Press & News
Anti-Mercosur rhetoric was once dominated by calls for climate awareness. Was it all just political opportunism?
Much ink has been expended in recent months on farmers’ concerns over the EU–Mercosur free trade agreement, which entered into force provisionally on Friday after more than two decades of negotiations.
It’s a marked shift from the climate concern and calls to preserve the Amazon, which dominated anti-Mercosur rhetoric when the Green Deal was in vogue. Those arguments now seem 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 like insurmountable sustainability concerns?
The answer is somewhere in between.
The deforestation conundrum
French leaders have at least been consistent in their opposition to the deal, cycling through counter-arguments from forest conservation to pesticides. The Mercosur agreement 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 is panned.
In the summer of 2019, Macron’s focus latched onto Amazon deforestation, which saw the French president accuse his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro of lying about environmental protection.
Was Macron sincere, or simply jumping on the climate bandwagon? Even some of the deal’s fiercest critics, such as Greenpeace, acknowledged that environmental concern had become politically convenient. 2019 marked the peak of the EU’s own climate ambitions and was the year the Commission unveiled the European Green Deal – its flagship plan to cut emissions by 2050.
If the EU was tightening its own environmental standards, calls for reciprocity from trade partners followed naturally – especially from regions with weaker regulatory frameworks, such as Mercosur.
In this context, creating an EU anti-deforestation law – the EUDR, originally championed by France – appeared to offer a neat 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. The EUDR has faced repeated delays and has become entangled in the EU’s broader push for simplification. Privately, many EU insiders also highlight flaws in how the legislation was drafted.
But when it comes to Mercosur, such delays mean the deal will come into force months before the deforestation law kicks in from 30 December. Green MEP Kai Tegethoff, from the transnational party Volt, told Euractiv he is concerned about the “implementation gap” between the two.
“We will be effectively allowing commodities like soy, coffee and cocoa to enter the Union without rigorous deforestation-free due diligence,” he said, urging the Commission not to present a further delay.
“The annex”
Alongside separate environmental legislation like EUDR, the EU negotiated an additional environmental annex to the Mercosur deal. Lula da Silva’s return to Brazil’s presidency in 2023 paved the way to sealing the agreement with reinforced green guarantees.
Agreed years after the core text was finalised in 2019, the annex reinforces commitments on deforestation and, crucially, makes the Paris Agreement an essential element of the deal.
In practical terms, this means that a future government reneging on its climate commitments could provide grounds to suspend the agreement.
David Kleimann, a Brussels-based trade expert at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), also noted that the trade pillar now in force also commits parties to not lowering 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 core political priorities,” Kleimann said.
For some observers, this is far from trivial. Irene Mia, senior fellow for Latin America at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, describes the outcome as a “notable experiment” in climate diplomacy and posits that it could even be “a blueprint” for both future trade agreements and “minilateralism” – where a small group of major economies cooperate on specific issues as traditional multilateral forums stall.
But although Mercosur finally looks like a done deal, criticism has not dissolved. Green politicians and environmental NGOs remain sceptical – 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 affiliated with Germany’s Green party, acknowledged the tension.
“Geopolitics hasn’t simply trumped climate concerns,” Kefferpütz said. “In a more fragmented global environment, defined by a breakdown of the global rules-based order, it is only natural that balances in this regard shift and are not set in stone.”
For Kefferpütz, environmental concerns remain “highly relevant.” But so, too, is strengthening ties with Latin America in the current circumstances. Whether the deal lives up to its green billing will ultimately come down to 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 provisional application now underway, that test begins in earnest.
