Two weights and two measures. So they are reacting in South America to what is happening in Europe, where the farmers' protests they brought the EU Commission, which had already modified the agreements in January CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) 2023-2027, exempting producers from compliance with certain rules to access the 300 billion euros in total subsidies, to take a further step backwards by giving up the objective of reducing CO30 emissions linked to agriculture to 2% by 2024, and that of restricting the use of pesticides by 2030 (under pressure above all from France, which has already on his own he had decided to postpone it to another time).
What do these measures have to do with it, which would appear to be only a "temporary derogation", as European Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski was keen to point out, with Latin America? A lot, because agricultural and above all environmental policies are at the center of thethe EU-Mercosur agreement, ready for years but struggling to take off due to mutual doubts, not least those of the French president Emmanuel Macron who vetoed it to an agreement that seemed to be on the home stretch and which instead, especially after the latest developments in the Old Continent, seems increasingly distant.
Mercosur: the reasons for the impasse
The official reasons for the impasse are, for our part, that the countries of South America and in particular Brazil are not able to respect green constraints and to duly protect the Amazon rainforest, which instead is being deforested at a frightening rate (a little less since Lula returned, but it's not very far from the point of no return) to make room for the cattle breeding and soybean crops, a raw material that is increasingly in demand and of which Brazil is now by far the world's leading exporter, with 100 million tonnes sold abroad in 2023, especially towards China but also of Europe itself, which produces less than 10% and yet needs it. Just as the Union needs fruit, sugar, coffee, cellulose, tobacco, just some of the commodities of which South America and especially Brazil is the leading producer and exporter at a global level.
Farmers: double standards from the EU?
However, they point out on the other side of the ocean, and with some reason although Lula's positions are ambiguous and the Belem Amazon summit last August actually produced a very disappointing agreement on climate policies, that rules imposed on agricultural producers Latin American crops have just been granted by the European Commission to European farmers, who are now exempted from the ban on expanding their crops and the consequent obligation to leave part of the land in its natural state.
Europe claims that these exemptions are temporary and dictated by exceptional reasons such as extreme meteorological phenomena, drought, fires, inflation, the increase in the cost of energy due, also, to the war in Ukraine. All true but then, they argue on the other side of the world, they should also be loosened the rules imposed on colleagues in the Southern hemisphere, and therefore rewritten an agreement between the EU and Mercosur which would thus be a bit hypocritical and accuseable of greenwashing. Also because in the meantime the European Union has already unilaterally launched its own regulation against deforestation, which will be fully imposed on trading partners from 30 December 2024 and which provides for a ban on the import of beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soya, wood and all derivatives of the raw materials mentioned, if they have been obtained by deforesting green areas and if no due diligence on the origin of the products is attached. Some experts point out in a specific intervention on the Folha of Sao Paulo that even before the EU-Mercosur agreement, there are the rules of the WTO, the World Trade Organization, which establish that products of foreign origin must receive, in the territory of Importing country, treatment no less favorable than that reserved for local products.
Interviewed by the Brazilian financial newspaper Economic Value, the famous agronomist Domingos Carvalho he even talks about “Brazilian miracle” and of Europe "which is afraid of the growing competitiveness of Brazilian agriculture", which in fact has seen a surge in recent decades, as already written on FIRSTonline. The expert reminds that Brazil is becoming the farm of the world using only 7,8% of its territory, and that productivity will be able to continue to grow without deforesting an inch of the Amazon but "exploiting unproductive and degraded areas from pastures, which thanks to the favorable climate and the numerous water basins can be reclaimed and enhanced".
Carvalho refers above all to the Cerrado, but forget that it is an extensive tropical savannah that actually guards the greatest biodiversity in the world, since it has over 6 thousand species of trees and 800 species of birds, and which is being deforested at rates even worse than those of the Amazon: it shrank by 2.133 square km in the first quarter of 2023, almost double compared to January-April 2021 So, who is right?
