The agreement, pending the green light from the European Parliament, includes several clauses designed to calm the opposition of farmers in the community bloc.
At a meeting of ambassadors in Brussels, the 27 member states of the European Union reached a qualified majority this Friday, despite the opposition of countries such as France, Poland, Ireland and Hungary.
It is an “important step in European trade policy and a strong signal of our strategic sovereignty,” celebrated the head of the German government, Friedrich Merz, one of the main defenders of the agreement.
With this result, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, will be able to fly to Paraguay and sign the agreement with Mercosur on Monday.
Even if the signing goes ahead in Asunción, the agreement will not immediately come into force, since on the European side the approval of the European Parliament is also needed, which must rule within a period of several weeks.
The result there is not at all clear, since some 150 MEPs (out of a total of 720) threaten to resort to justice to prevent the application of the agreement.
The European Commission has been negotiating this vast agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay since 1999, which plans to create the largest free trade area on the planet, with more than 700 million consumers, and eliminate tariffs on more than 90% of their bilateral trade.
The European agricultural sector fears the impact of a massive arrival of South American meat, rice, honey or soybeans, in exchange for the export of European vehicles, machinery, cheeses and wines to Mercosur.
Detractors of the pact, starting with France, believe that the European market could be seriously disrupted by the entry of more competitive South American products due to production standards considered less rigorous.
Its defenders, such as Spain and Germany, instead estimate that the agreement will diversify trade opportunities for an EU threatened by Chinese competition and the United States’ tariff policy.
Italy, which in December joined France’s opposition and then managed to block the agreement, changed its position this week.
Its prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, celebrated “the balance” obtained with the new clauses to protect the primary sector.
“We have always said that we are in favor of the agreement with Mercosur when there are sufficient guarantees for our farmers,” he said.
Concessions to the European agricultural sector
To calm the anger of farmers and ranchers, fearful of the impact that reducing tariffs would have, the Commission designed a series of clauses and concessions in recent months.
“Agricultural priorities have been at the core” of the negotiations, and “we have negotiated like crazy,” Olof Gill, one of the European Commission’s spokespersons, said Thursday.
Among the measures, the Commission announced in September a series of guarantees for its meat, poultry, rice, honey, eggs and ethanol sectors, limiting the quota of Latin American products exempt from tariffs and intervening in case of market destabilization.
In December, the Commission also announced that it will open an investigation if the price of a Mercosur product is at least 8% lower than that of the same merchandise in the EU, and if the volume of imports increases by more than 8%.
The European executive also committed to legislating on pesticide residues in imports, an aspect that farmers denounce as indicative of “unfair competition.”
This week the Commission announced the total ban of three substances: thiophanate-methyl, carbendazim and benomyl, especially in citrus fruits, mangoes and papayas.
France decreed the temporary cessation of some agricultural products treated with substances prohibited in the European Union, mainly South American ones.
