Mercosur: a leap into the unknown

It is now up to the European Parliament to decide on the future of the trade agreement between the European Union and the Mercosur countries, following its adoption by a qualified majority of the permanent representatives of the EU Member States. When making their individual choices, MEPs will have to take into account not only the geopolitical and economic issues highlighted by the European Commission to speed up ratification, but also the serious consequences of this agreement for European agriculture. The latter currently lacks the tools to stand up to competition from Latin American countries. 

The measures taken by the European Commission in recent days do not restore the balance and could not justify any change in position on the agricultural aspects of this agreement, which is detrimental to European farmers:

• Lowering the monitoring threshold for activating the safeguard clause for agricultural products to 5% does not change the situation. This safeguard clause is purely cosmetic. It provides no additional guarantees to those negotiated in the agreement itself. Furthermore, the real, automatic and robust reciprocity clauses initially proposed by the European Parliament have been discarded. Under these conditions, European farmers would indeed face unfair competition, caught between European rules, with a strong impact on their competitiveness, aimed at protecting the environment and EU consumers on the one hand, and imported products that flout these same standards on the other. The finalisation of this agreement would deal a fatal blow to the credibility of the rules put in place within the EU over the last 20 years to regulate agricultural activity. 
• As regards the recent budgetary statement on the CAP of President Ursula von der Leyen, it does not in any way constitute a guarantee for European farmers. Although the European Commission has recognised that at least €400 billion would be needed to preserve the CAP budget, rather than the €300 billion in the protected envelope, the recent letter from Ursula von der Leyen does not provide any guarantees at this stage nor the necessary visibility for European farmers. On the contrary, the President of the European Commission is leaving harmful doubts hanging over possible distortions of competition, not only from third countries, but also within the internal market itself, depending on the choices that Member States may make after 2027 in implementing their national programmes. Moreover, the Commission is confronting national leaders with an unsolvable financial equation, having slashed the CAP by 20%, cohesion by 40% and the European Social Fund by 100% within the proposed single fund. Under these conditions, how can the EU ensure calm arbitration and offer farmers clear prospects after 2027 within a common framework? 

In the coming days, MEPs will therefore face one of the most important choices of the current term: whether or not to support the Mercosur agreement. At this stage, such support would be misunderstood by almost all farmers in the European Union. It would sow the seeds of a major rift between Europe and its agricultural community, one of the most committed to this project, which has, until now, enabled the EU to become an agricultural powerhouse. The EU finds itself at a crossroads, in an extremely fragile position, at a time when world powers are turning agriculture into a major geopolitical weapon of the 21st century. 

The agreement negotiated by the European Commission with Mercosur is outdated in this respect. It follows in the footsteps of all those negotiations in which European agriculture has been the banker, the losing sector, whenever a potential overall benefit for the Union was expected. 

At a time when European sovereignty is a leitmotif repeated ad nauseam by European and national political circles, this sovereignty depends first and foremost on our ability to increase our agricultural production in order to meet our food security needs, our ability to supply our importing partners, and our assurance that we can build an autonomous foundation for our emerging bioeconomy. the sincerity of its use by some remains to be seen, unless it is a symptom of a Europe without an economic compass, negotiating agreements, measures and countermeasures according to particular interests, without a strategy to place Europe and Europeans at the forefront of Community action.