The European Union and the Mercosur bloc of South American countries signed on Saturday signed a free trade deal that follows a quarter-century of careful negotiations. France still remains opposed to the trade agreement, with the country’s powerful agricultural lobby warning it could damage local farmers’ livelihoods.
Just wanted to chime in and say that all french representatives voted against it, because France have strong regulations imposed upon farmers and this agreement would allow for food grown or raised under less strict regulations to be sold in France. As these products will probably be sold cheaper, it raises concern for farmers who will stil need to comply to regulations, or for consumer if these regulations are lifted.
Didn’t those regulations also already apply to all other EU countries?
EU regulations are applied in France, but there are stricter regulations, for exemple the ban of more neonicotinoids, herbicides and insecticides than required by EU.
If it were simply those, it seems to be a matter of producing in a way that protects the environment in France, rather than it being a safer, healthier product. The question is why don’t SA countries care about the effects on their environment in the same way, but that is not something for the EU to enforce on them, even if we are indirectly externalizing the negatives of our consumption, just like carbon tax or delocalized production…
I think this is great. Anybody know what the arbitration settled on? A major problem of the TTIP with North America was that the arbitration was shady and corporations could sue countries for public policy that hurt their bottom line (eg antismoking, fat tax). Is this addressed in the deal in a better way this time?
Kinda yes, this trade agreement does not include the kind of investor-State arbitration (ISDS) we saw in TTIP. Its dispute settlement provisions are different and do not give individual companies the right to sue a government for regulatory decisions. It’s much more like what happens in the WTO.
In fact, the treaty doesn’t even regulate investor-to-state dispute settlement between investors and states. On this topic, it just focuses on state-to-state dispute mechanisms for covered provisions, WTO style from my understanding.
The treaty discusses a rebalancing mechanism in the dispute settlement chapter. So, a party state may to take counter-measures if a covered measure by the other nullifies or substantially impairs benefits. So with this treaty, corporations have no standing to sue against national policy.
Still, any investment protections that apply for EU investors in Mercosur countries (or vice versa) will continue to derive from existing bilateral investment treaties (the BITs) between individual EU countries and Mercosur partners, not from the EU–Mercosur trade deal itself. These BITs are still valid until their expiration (if it exists), or a party terminates it. But again, these are separate treaties from this trade agreement.
