French President Emmanuel Macron has demonstrated his total political impotence by categorically rejecting the Mercosur/European Union (EU) agreement using arguments based on environmental issues, when in reality what makes it impossible for the agreement to be approved by the Strasbourg Parliament is the rebellion unleashed more once by French agricultural producers and, in general, by European producers, who are totally opposed to agriculture developed in the Southern Cone of Latin America.
French producers, who are the most subsidized in the world, know that the fundamental problem of French agriculture is its absolute inability to compete with the superior productivity of South American production, especially that of the two major protagonists of world agri-food production, which are the Brazil and Argentina.
Therefore, as one of the young leaders of this rebellion says: “…if the agreement with Mercosur is approved, all of Europe will be set on fire”. This is not the result of a sudden pyromaniac passion, but the realization that European producers, and especially the French, know that the only way to survive is to enclose themselves in brutal protectionism. This decision implies the recognition of the total historical and productive impossibility of the sector, in a world fully integrated by the technological revolution.
That is why they fear, and rightly so, not only the phenomenal productivity of Mercosur, but also the more modest and less subsidized production of vegetables and fruits in Morocco and Tunisia.
This is the reality of the facts and, given them, Mercosur’s conclusion is unique and definitive. On the one hand, there is no possibility of the Strasbourg Parliament, with a large center-right and extreme-right majority, approving the Mercosur/EU agreement because the degree of mobilization of French and European producers is truly total, and ahead Among them are the thousands of state-of-the-art tractors purchased with subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). And they are preparing to close the entire area around Parliament in the Alsace capital, right down to the last little streets of Brussels.
On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that Emmanuel Macron is an extremely weakened figure since his party was the big loser in the last French legislative elections, and that now the clearest perspective is that the winner of the next presidential elections will be Marine Le Pen, as expression of the extreme right and clear favorite of the agricultural sector, and that it drastically rejects, and in all its terms, the agreement with Mercosur.
For the countries of the Southern Cone, there is only one conclusion to this situation: the rebellion of the agricultural sector in Europe prevents any Mercosur/EU agreement and therefore it is necessary to seek a profoundly different alternative solution, namely: the free trade agreement between the China and Mercosur that the Asian country, led by President Xi Jinping, offered to the region more than three years ago.
It is worth highlighting that China is the largest agri-food market in the world, centered on a powerful middle class made up of more than 500 million people with incomes comparable to that of Americans, of 35 thousand / 45 thousand dollars per year, whose tastes are increasingly differentiated. and whose demand is increasingly “decommoditized” and, preferably, branded, that is, with increasingly higher prices.
China is the second largest economy in the world ($19.6 trillion / 19% of global GDP) and has been growing at 5% per year for the last five years, following the pandemic. This means double the growth of the US economy (2.1% in 2023) and triple the growth of the European Union economy.
Meanwhile, Europe, led by Germany, is experiencing a deep depression of a structural nature, triggered by the jump in the price of fuel from Russia, whose supply has now been interrupted by the war in Ukraine.
Germany’s economy, which is one of the four main economies in the world, has been showing contraction for three years. In 2023, it fell 0.5%, which represented the worst performance among major global economies.
At the same time, in the EU, bureaucratic regulations and sanctions on agricultural producers have multiplied to respond to the challenge of climate change, further deepening the sector’s lack of competitiveness/productivity.