Environmental contestation in the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement: gone but not forgotten?

On January 17th, a historical landmark was reached in EU–South American relations: the President of the European Commission and representatives of Mercosur’s four founding member states finally signed the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement, whose negotiations were launched in June 1999. After the signing of the EU-Mercosur Association Agreement, the trade branch of the agreement would enter into force as soon as it was approved by the European Parliament and the national parliaments of Mercosur. 

Nonetheless, although economically the agreement is mutually beneficial as both blocs economies are highly complementary, the deal has recently sparked some controversies, especially in Europe. In the past few years, environmental concerns have been constantly raised in Europe as a reason for not moving towards signing the text. Even the most recent version of the text (amended in 2024) - which contains even more environmental dispositions in response to demands from the EU - is criticized for not going far enough in the topic. Given the resonance that this discourse has in the European public opinion, it was very likely that debates will re-emerge when the agreement wasput to vote at the European Parliament. Indeed, a few days after the signature of the agreement, a motion at the European Parliament was approved to send the agreement to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for reviewing its legality - a procedure that can delay the ratification of the agreement up to 2 years on the European side. 

Nonetheless, given the long time frame of the negotiations, when and how did the European environmental contestation start and what role has it played in EU-Mercosur talks? To understand the political and economic dynamics and the actors behind these answers, we first need to drive quickly into the history of the EU-Mercosur talks until its most recent episodes.  

The EU-Mercosur negotiations in two times: the first (1999-2004) and the second attempt (2010-2019)

Between 1999 to 2004, the first negotiation attempts between the EU and Mercosur were carried out. Since the first negotiation round, both parties were already committed to sustainability and sustainable development as principles of the talks. However, despite some debates on the commitment to sustainability in the agreement, the EU and Mercosur were mostly concerned about the traditional trade topics, such as trade on goods, services, intellectual property and government procurement. In October 2004, the negotiations were suspended, but not due to contentious views on environmental dispositions - or Sanitary and Phytosanitary standards - but rather due to commercial offers being considered not sufficient by either side. 

After a hiatus of six years, negotiations were re-launched in May 2010. Again, at the time, both parties reiterated their commitment to sustainable development and sustainable regulatory standards within their future commercial association. Indeed, both sides started negotiating back then a Trade and Sustainable Development chapter within the trade branch of the agreement. Nonetheless, what eventually blocked the negotiations until 2016 was the reluctance from both sides - especially Mercosur’s - to agree to a common offer wider than the one presented back in September 2004.

The environment was not a point of contention either as the negotiations regained momentum from 2016 to 2019 - culminating in the 2019 agreement in principle. Indeed, the EU was mostly concerned at taking advantage of the free-trade ideology that seemed to prevail among the heads of Mercosur member states at the time, including a propensity to be open to European offensive interests, such as the ones in trade in goods (especially concerning manufactured goods), trade in services, securing the EU’s geographical indications and liberalizing government procurement. Despite the positive signals, including the 2019 agreement, something seemed to change as the agreement gained traction and, most importantly, visibility.

2019:The agreement in principle and the Amazon on fire

2019 brought with it renewed public interest in and scrutiny of the agreement. The negotiations had been quietly gaining momentum from around 2016 but this behind-the-scenes action culminated in the very public signing of the agreement in principle at the meeting of the G20 in Osaka in June 2019. The leaders of the four Mercosur  founding countries were present for the signing, along with the heads of state of key EU member states (some happier to be there than others), and then EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. That was arguably the first symbolic blow in a war of narratives that has lasted for almost 7 years now.

There had always been some degree of social opposition to the agreement on the EU side since the first exchanges for an association agreement. Throughout the years, the complaints (and plaintiffs) have tended to stay the same: farmer strongholds in the EU (most prominently France, Ireland and Belgium, to be later joined by newer member states such as Poland and Romania) complaining about the incoming threat to rural livelihoods. These concerns waxed and waned as the negotiations themselves picked up steam just to cool down once more (and finally get that final push, as seen above).

But in 2019 something changed. And much of it could be attributed to the moment of signing itself, and to one of the most visible and divisive signatories on stage: Jair Bolsonaro, then president of Brazil. Bolsonaro’s name brought Europe’s eye back to Brazil in a way it hadn’t in years (mostly due to the economic downturn and diplomatic blackout of the post-Lula years). But now, it wasn’t economists touting Brazil’s seemingly endless economic boom, it was environmentalists and experts decrying the unprecedented rise in logging (legal or otherwise) in the Brazilian Amazon (along with the devastation inflicted upon other biomes such as the Cerrado).

And then the 2019 Amazon fires came. Now it wasn’t just what was visible in expert reporting or satellite data imaging. It was the devastating fires that seemed to dominate evening broadcasts around the world at the time (the peak of the burning in August 2019, just months after the signing). And that of course wasn’t helped by messaging coming from the top. Bolsonaro and his ministers repeatedly downplayed the severity of the fires, engaged in climate denialism and, to make matters even more uncertain for the fate of the AA, engaged in a war of words with French president Emmanuel Macron, trading personal insults and accusations of overreach and hypocrisy.

The thing is, Macron was one of those unhappy few at the moment of signing to begin with. A more cynical view of the matter would bring one to the conclusion that Macron had now found a new face and name to add to the long running complaints over the Commission’s disregard for the wellbeing of French farmers. Now, the argument could also be made clearer than ever that the agreement was not only bad for farmers, but also bad for the planet. That put farmers now together with environmentalists in opposition to the agreement (even though these groups had been famously at odds over accusations of “greenwashing” reforms to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy). Other arguments were also made by policymakers and producers such as on the low quality (and possible poisoning) of Brazilian beef, but it could be said that - for a while at least - nothing stuck quite as much as the planet-wrecking rhetoric, personified by agreement supporter Jair Bolsonaro.

Protecting our farmers (but maybe not our forests)

But as the years went on, the ones at the top seemed to steer away from the environmental angle (in particular with renewed promises of environmental stewardship under the returning Lula government) and in the end, the one argument that almost pushed the agreement over the rails, the one disagreement that has been rocking the negotiating table since the very beginning, that could make or break the agreement, was: how much will this hurt our farmers? Of course, the sustainability argument would pop up in medium-scale public protests and marches across EU member state capitals now and then, either directly or indirectly condemning the agreement, in light of a perceived hypocrisy in the Commission’s push for greening trade and broader Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) mechanisms in new agreements.

Eventually though, the EU’s Green Deal and TSD would be superseded by strategic policies seeking to bring the EU back in the geopolitical game, asserting its independence and resilience through trade, and with issues such as food sovereignty and the need to secure critical raw materials (both goals which could be arguably made more feasible with the AA) now taking center stage, the sustainability/sustainable development argument lost traction and became contained to a handful of statements or reports by transnational NGOs and the Greens in the European Parliament. In the end, sustainability left the stage and the fight to watch was the match between geopolitical and farming interests, and Trump unavoidably tipped the scales in favor of the former. Farmers were not left empty-handed, however, as the Commission attempted to sweeten the deal by pushing forward billions of Euros to boost its Common Agricultural Policy and thus sway member states reluctant to stand behind the deal - as it was the case especially for Italy, whose vote was the most decisive to approve the signature of the agreement at the EU Council. Amazon, however, was kept out of the headlines for good.

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Victor Ferro is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). He has master's degree in Latin American Studies from Universidad de Salamanca, Stockholm University and Université Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is also the Research Assistant for the EULAS Network. Author of A Crescente Importância Das Questões Ambientais Nas Negociações UE-Mercosul: Do Consenso Abrangente À Divergência Incontornável (1995-2024) (In Holzhacker et. el. Brasil e a UE na governança ambiental global. Habitus Editora, 2025).

Emilio del Pupo has a PhD in Political, Social and Regional Change of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Sciences (HELSUS) of the University of Helsinki. He has a master's degree in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research from Abo Akademi. Author of Politicisation And Agricultural (Post-) Exceptionalism in EU-Mercosur Association Agreement (JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2025)

The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the EULAS Network.