Subscribe
European farmers are protesting the EU-Mercosur trade deal.
They fear it will flood markets with cheaper South American imports, threatening their livelihoods.
The agreement, signed in January 2026, aims to create a vast free trade zone.
The deal faces delays as European lawmakers seek a judicial review.
Since December 2025, a wave of agrarian anger has swept across western and central Europe: Farmers have blocked the famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris, tractors have descended upon the European Union (EU) Parliament in Strasbourg, France, poured milk outside supermarket windows, and dumped manure and hay outside agriculture offices.
Their messages blazoned across banners and placards: ‘STOP Mercosur’, ‘révolte paysanne reprend’ (peasant revolt resumes), ‘maakt onze suiker zuur (make our sugar sour), ‘Sell Out’, ‘Mercosur = unsafe food’, Députés, défendez notre blé (Members of Parliament, defend our wheat).
The trigger is the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, which farmers denounce as a “cars for cows” deal, fearing that it will flood European markets with cheaper imports from South America, in exchange for preferential market access for European automobile exports to Mercosur countries.
In January 2026, the EU and the Mercosur bloc formally signed a free trade agreement (FTA), creating one of the biggest free trade zones in the world, linking Europe with South America and covering a market of 700 million consumers, as data by EU commission showed.
Mercosur or the Southern Common Market is a regional South American trade bloc established in 1991 and comprising of nations of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.
The agreement, which has been in the making for 25 years, was signed by EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič and his Mercosur counterparts, in Paraguay on January 17, 2026.
The EU-Mercosur Partnership Agreement (EMPA) and the EU-Mercosur Interim Trade Agreement (ITA) will have to be ratified by all EU Member States and the ITA will require the consent of the European Parliament and the adoption of a decision on the conclusion by the Council, after which it will enter into force.
However, just days after the formal signing, the ratification seems to have run into trouble with the European lawmakers voting to block it. On January 21, lawmakers of 27 member European Union voted 334 to 324 in favour to send the trade deal to European Court of Justice (ECJ) for a judicial review. Reports now say that the deal could be delayed by two years.
Maria Welsh, member of European parliament and who is against the deal, said in a social media post that she voted against referring it to the ECJ because she wanted members to have their say on the deal but referring it to the court delays that process by probably two years and that this delay creates more uncertainty for farmers. “It also opens the door to the scenario where the commission could implement the trade elements of the Mercosur before elected MEPs like myself have had the opportunity to vote on it.”
France, which is one of Europe’s major agricultural producer, and where much of the farmer protest is centred, wanted stronger protections for farmers. Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot welcomed the parliament’s vote, saying in a social media post that the assembly “expressed itself in line with the position that we have defended. France takes responsibility for saying no when it has to, and history often proves it right. The fight continues to protect our agriculture and ensure our food sovereignty.”
France was also one of the five countries which had voted against signing the deal on January 9, along with Ireland, Poland, Hungary and Austria.
Italian Prime Minister Girogia Meloni had also refused to provide her country’s vote until the European Commission promised additional agricultural support, following which EU commissioner promised to an additional €45 billion available for the agriculture sector in the next long term budget for farm payments.
The deal will remove duties on over 90 per cent of goods exported to EU from the South American countries and vice versa. However, tariffs already in place will decline in a planned phase out period of 10-15 years.
By the end of this period, custom duties on a vast majority of products will be reduced to zero. Agricultural products and critical minerals from Mercosur, and majorly cars, along with chemicals and pharmaceuticals from Europe, are expected to be among the main beneficiaries.
Currently, Mercosur imposes a 35 per cent import tariff (the highest among all industrial goods categories) on cars imported from the EU.
The European Commission projects that the agreement will remove more than €4 billion worth of duties on EU exports annually. Current goods trade between the two blocs stands at €111 billion annually. By 2040, the EU commission estimates that the agreement will boost EU exports by €49 billion and Mercosur exports by €9 billion.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called the deal a win-win partnership, with both regions standing to gain “economically, diplomatically and geopolitically” but European farmers, remain unconvinced, arguing that the promised gains come at a direct cost to their livelihoods.
Protesting farmers, especially from France, Poland, Ireland, Italy and Belgium, fear unfair competition and say that the FTA will undercut European agriculture by allowing cheaper foreign products to replace domestic goods, even as investment by local farmers is restricted.
“We are short of chickens and they come from Brazil and Ukraine, and today anyone who wants to set up a chicken farm is prohibited from doing so but it is today that we need chickens. We need to invest but the authorities are prohibiting them from doing so but at the same time turning a blind eye of what’s coming in from abroad which does not comply with any standards,” said Thomas Lemme, president, Young Farmers of Côte-d'Or in France, while addressing protesting farmers in France’s Dijon region.
The EU has classified certain products as ‘sensitive commodities’ in the agriculture sector, for which ‘safeguard’ clauses have been made. Some of the sensitive products include beef, poultry meat, milk powder, cheese, rice, maize and sorghum, sugar, honey, ethanol, biodiesel, among others.
These clauses limit tariff free quotas for Mercosur products. For example, for beef, the quota allows in only an additional 1.5 per cent of total EU production, and for poultry, only 1.3 per cent. And as per the safeguard measures, if there are sudden, sharp rises in imports, the EU can take action to limit them.
The EU council said that there should be a close monitoring of imports of sensitive products and that the countries should inform the commission of any trends in imports which might call for imposition of safeguard measures and temporary suspension of tariff preferences in the case of “serious injury to EU farmers”. Serious injury is defined as an increase in import volume or a decrease in prices by more than 8 per cent compared to the three-year average.
Further, the commission should present a monitoring report at least every six months. The agreement also seeks to protect 344 EU food and drink products from imitation in Mercosur countries.
However, these safeguards are internal procedures of the EU and do not belong to the agreement, Andrés Malamud, senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, told Down To Earth.
“It is hard to foresee how the Mercosur countries will react to their application.”
Farmers are unconvinced about the safeguards as they fear unfair competition from South American farmers, who have lower production cost as well as looser environmental controls.
A farmer speaking to France 24 channel during a protest said, “It’s truly a scandal. We are bringing in products that don’t meet the same standards we are required to follow. In Europe farmers are forced to comply with strict environmental and pesticide standards, yet imports are allowed that don’t meet those standards.”
Similar safeguards are also for cars in Mercosur countries, to address any potential “boom” in vehicle imports coming from Europe.
Under the agreement, while Mercosur will phase out tariffs on EU-manufactured vehicles over a 15-year period, there are additional exceptions in the deal to extend this timeframe.
Maria C Latorre, Professor of Applied Economics at The Complutense University of Madrid argued the benefits of the deal outweighs the disadvantages and that not all agricultural producers are unhappy.
“Oil producers, wine producers, dairy, face huge tariffs right now but they will win with this agreement. So we have to talk about only some parts,” she says while speaking to France 24 news channel.
“I have estimated that after it is fully implemented which is a lot of years, only around 15 per cent of the trade coming from Mercosur to EU is agriculture. Rest 60 per cent is manufacturing and remaining 25 per cent is services,” she said.
The timing of the agreement is telling, with the deal being seen as a test of diplomacy in the current times. It has been more than 25 years in the making and had effectively been in limbo since 2019, when political opposition and environmental concerns stalled its progress. Its revival and eventual signing come amid growing global trade uncertainty, driven in large part by the United States’ increasingly unilateral tariff policies.
The current world trade order has pushed the EU to diversify trade partnerships and reduce exposure to geopolitical and economic shocks by securing new markets and allies.
Leyen, on the occasion of the signing, said, “Our signal to the rest of the world is clear: the EU and Mercosur are choosing cooperation over competition, and partnership over polarisation.”
Rebecca Christie, senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels based think tank, told DW News that EU has realised they need to reach out to the rest of the world with the US being an unstable and unreliable trading partner.
This shift was seen on the Mercosur side as well. Despite sharp public disagreements between the governments of Brazil and Argentina on different political issues in the recent time, the two countries ultimately set aside differences to endorse the agreement.
Hours after the January 21 vote, Luis Garicano, Professor at London School of Economics at School of Public Policy and former member of the European Parliament, in a social media post, said, “I hope the EU will spare us any talk of geopolitical Europe and finding alternatives to US power after the catastrophic vote to kill Mercosur.”
Beyond tariffs and market access, the agreement also has a strategic resource dimension that has received far less public attention. Several Mercosur countries sit atop minerals that could be increasingly central to the EU’s industrial and climate ambitions. Brazil accounts for roughly a fifth of global reserves of graphite, nickel, manganese and rare earth elements, and dominates production of niobium, a metal critical for high-performance alloys used in aviation and defence. Argentina, meanwhile, has emerged as a key player in the global lithium supply chain, a key component in electric vehicle batteries.
As concerns grow over supply-chain concentration and strategic dependence, particularly on China, through this deal, the EU seeks to secure alternative sources of critical raw materials.
Environmentalists have raised concerns that the deal could accelerate deforestation with trade of products like beef, poultry, soy, and sugar in the region and would degrade the continent’s forests further, while leading to trade of emissions-heavy products escalating the climate crisis.
Laura Restrepo Alameda, advocacy officer at Climate Action Network Latin America, said that rather than supporting a transition to more sustainable, resilient agriculture, the deal risks reinforcing an agribusiness model based on exports of large-scale monocultures, dangerous pesticides and the concentration of power in a few agribusiness corporations who have been pushing for environmental rollbacks.
“The world’s biggest meat corporation, the Brazilian JBS, which will benefit greatly from this deal, already has a track record of human rights violations and is engaged in illegal deforestation,” she said in a press statement.
Further, a legal analysis of the sustainability of the agreement by professors from University of Amsterdam finds that the agreement has the potential to undermine the EU’s existing commitments to mitigate the climate crisis and stand in the way of green policies adopted in the future by increasing trade in emission-intensive goods.
The deal refers to the Paris Agreement in its text as an “essential element”, saying that it will allow the suspension of the agreement if a Party leaves the Paris Agreement and also if it stops being a party “in good faith”, i.e. undermines the Paris Agreement from within.
However, Christina Eckes, professor of European law at the University of Amsterdam and the author of the legal analysis, called the reference vague. “Referring to the Paris Agreement as an essential element does not give climate concerns precedence. The reference is vague and adds little meaning or teeth to already existing international obligations.”
Be it the EU-Mercosur deal or the US-India trade deal, there is a broader pattern of agricultural resistance seen across modern free trade agreements. As Europe grapples with domestic backlash, the deal is being closely watched elsewhere, including in India, where negotiations on an India-EU trade agreement is set to conclude soon.