Can South America Influence the Direction of EU Law? The Case of the EU-Mercosur Deal and Animal Welfare
- Francesco Duina
- 12 minutes ago
- 6 min read
This post draws from Duina's recent post on The JCSM Blog - Ideas on Europe, ''Always a Norm Exporter? The Case of Animal Welfare Policy and Trade' (Dec, 2025). Read the full article here.
After more than 25 years of negotiations, the EU and Mercosur reached a final agreement on their trade deal in early January. The last roadblock was put up by Austria, France, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland continuing their opposition to what they perceived to be unfair agricultural competition from Latin America. They needed an ambivalent Italy to join them in their stance. When Italy asserted its support for the deal in response to the European Commission’s announcement that farmers would get early access to €45 billion from the forthcoming budget for 2028-2034 and have safeguard mechanisms related to price fluctuations, the final hurdle was overcome. The subsequent unexpected vote in the European Parliament on January 21 to refer the deal to the European Court of Justice for confirmation of its legality certainly came as a surprise, but this will most likely result in a time delay (several months to perhaps two years) in ratification rather than substantive changes.
Much will be written about who – across industries and countries – will gain or lose in terms of trade. But the deal will be consequential for reasons beyond trade. Among them is what it might tell us about the EU’s ability to set its own laws and then project its regulatory frameworks onto its trading partners – in Latin America and other parts of the world.
For decades, in fact, the EU has been described as setting its own laws with little influence from outsiders and then exporting them with remarkable success. Observers have described how the EU has done this indirectly through the Brussels Effect, whereby countries and trading blocs in other parts of the world pre-emptively adopt EU internal standards in order to facilitate trade with the EU. And how it has done so directly, by way of imposing its own standards through trade agreements. Many have viewed such regulatory projection as perhaps the EU’s most important form of international power.
The possibility that the EU itself might import standards from other countries or blocs has been given little consideration. Instead, attention has consistently gone to the continued production of EU internal regulations which, once in place, have had significant external effects. The EU’s unabated propensity to regulate has sustained this interest: its various efforts to slow down or even reverse its regulatory output have come and gone, with little impact on the overall picture. Between 2019 and 2024 alone, for instance, the EU passed 13,000 legal acts. The EU has in turn relished the benefits associated with being the ‘first mover’ in new areas such as, say, digital markets and environmental policy: it knows that those who regulate first set the terms and that those who follow must at least consider them, especially if the first mover enjoys a huge internal market. These dynamics have turned the EU into a regulatory juggernaut committed to its internal standards and historically eager to have other countries and blocs adopt them.
But, as I show in my recent article in the Journal of Common Market Studies, the EU-Mercosur negotiations led to a very unusual turn of events in at least one area: animal welfare. I discuss below this turn of events and its implications beyond animal welfare.
Animal Welfare and the EU-Mercosur Deal
In late 2023, the EU – widely viewed as already having a wide-reaching regulatory framework when it comes to animal welfare – was about to announce four long-awaited proposals on transport, slaughter, labelling, and the housing of animals. The Commission had determined that its existing frameworks, developed over the previous 25 years or so, required modernization. Equally important, major polls, the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘End the Age Cage’ that was supported by 170 non-governmental organizations and nearly 1.5 million citizens across the EU, and various protests, electoral campaigns and other civil society initiatives had put pressure on the EU. More broadly, the measures were consistent with its wider effort to ‘green’ agricultural trade.
Crucially, and not surprisingly, the four proposals would have come with ‘conditionality’ expectations: the requirement that trade partners exporting products into the EU comply in their treatment of animals with the standards set in those laws. An announcement by the Commission on the proposals was expected by the end of December 2023. But starting in the summer of that year the momentum slowed. Then, in her State of the Union speech in September, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signaled that something might go astray: there was no mention of animal welfare in her list of priorities. At the end of 2023, the Commission finally presented a proposal only on transport. The surprise turnaround caused significant consternation. The media publicized it, and NGOs and other interested parties voiced their objections (with, for instance, Eurogroup for Animals putting up posters in Brussels’ subway system) that continued well into late 2024.
What can explain this unexpected turn of events? Several factors surely played a role. These included powerful farmers’ protests against more agricultural regulation and unfair international competition, a diminished interest in the Commission’s Green Deal at a time when conservative populist parties seemed poised to do well in national and EU elections, and food security concerns fueled by the war in Ukraine.
But the pending ratification of the EU-Mercosur trade deal (over twenty years in the making) also played a (late-stage) role. In particular, Commission officials worried – whether justifiably or not – that the proposals’ conditionality clauses for exporters to the EU would have risked upsetting the South American countries given their lower standards. These concerns led those officials to conclude that only one of the four proposals could go ahead. The EU-Mercosur trade deal thus became the ‘nail in the coffin’ for animal welfare progress in the EU.
What is crucial to emphasize here is that this meant not only a derailment of internal EU policy but, in effect, a willingness to accept that the lower standards of trading partners should be a cause of that derailment. Put differently, rather than a rule ‘giver’ the EU became in essence a rule ‘taker.’ Close attention should therefore go to how, exactly, Commission officials reached their position.
My analysis highlights the confluence of three dynamics. The first were institutional: competition amongst three directorates-general, with Directorate General Trade prevailing in its push to conclude the deal over the preferences of Director General Health (which supported the proposals) and Director General AGRI (which demanded that, should the proposals be pursued, conditionality had to be imposed). The second set of dynamics were temporal: animal welfare came to be seen as the ‘last straw’ in terms of EU demands on Mercosur especially because the EU had just months before greatly frustrated the Mercosur countries with extensive demands on deforestation. The third were symbolic: the Commission had made increasingly vocal public commitments to conclude several major trade deals in the very near future.
The EU thus came to favor trade over regulatory projection in the area of animal welfare – allowing in fact external regulatory frameworks to influence its own. This turn of events invites two broader reflections beyond animal welfare, both of relevance for Latin America.
Two Broader Lessons
The first lesson concerns regulation and trade. Simply put, the EU may no longer be fundamentally concerned with the projection of regulatory power. We know that the Commission has already asserted, in part given its new Open Strategic Autonomy direction, the importance of geopolitical priorities as it pursues trade opportunities across the world, including Latin America. Regulatory power may become a victim of this new approach. This will open up possibilities for its trading partners to exert more influence on their – and the EU’s – regulatory trajectories as they engage with the EU on trade. Indeed, the European Parliament’s January 21 vote to question the legality of the EU-Mercosur deal was driven mostly by concerns about whether it contains mechanisms that restrict the EU’s ability to set its own environmental and consumer health policies going forward.
Second, and relatedly, there may be subject areas beyond animal welfare where the EU will struggle to impose its regulatory standards onto its trading partners, again across the world and in Latin America specifically. There is in fact something about animal welfare that also applies to policy areas like the environment and labor standards. The target is not the physical standards of finished products that exporters wish to send to the EU. Instead, it is the processes associated with the production of those products. These are much harder to observe and measure, and expecting regulatory changes in the trading partners is highly intrusive. The EU will therefore likely find it rather difficult to project its standards in those areas – as it in fact found with the Mercosur parties again when it came to deforestation.
Francesco Duina is Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology at Bates College (USA). His research focuses on the relationship between the economy, culture, and politics. He co-edited Standardizing the World: EU Trade Policy and the Road to Convergence, published by Oxford University Press.
The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the EULAS Network.