Much ink has been expended in recent months on farmers’ concerns over the EU–Mercosur free trade agreement, which entered into force provisionally on Friday after more than two decades of negotiations.
It’s a marked shift from the climate concern and calls to preserve the Amazon, which dominated anti-Mercosur rhetoric when the Green Deal was in vogue. Those arguments now seem to have faded, largely confined to a handful of green politicians and long-opposed NGOs and think tanks.
What changed? Was it all political opportunism? Or did the Commission manage to address what once seemed like insurmountable sustainability concerns?
The answer is somewhere in between.
The deforestation conundrum
French leaders have at least been consistent in their opposition to the deal, cycling through counter-arguments from forest conservation to pesticides. The Mercosur agreement has become one of the most toxic political issues in France – and a rare issue that cuts across the political…
