Europe’s credibility as a leader on climate change risks being shredded in the Amazon rainforest if Brussels concludes a landmark South American trade pact this month.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is pushing for the Mercosur trade bloc to finalize an accord with the EU before the end of June, but EU lawmakers and scientists warn that the deal’s green clauses are toothless and will give carte blanche for increased deforestation and human rights abuses.
Under Bolsonaro, Amazon deforestation has reached a record level and Brazilian indigenous leaders say the accord will cause “blood to be spilled” as more forests are cleared to make way for ranching and sugar cane plantations.
Fully aware of the environmental sensitivities of the deal, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has called for a “balanced” pact in line with the Paris climate agreement and Trade Minister Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne last month promised to push green issues within the trade talks.
Despite such promises, however, a person involved in the deal told POLITICO that environmental provisions in the current text are no more robust than those in the EU-Mexico trade pact, which lacks real enforcement powers.
“We are living through a climate emergency and we will oppose any trade deal that risks the destruction of the Amazon to produce beef for our tables” — Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP
In the sustainability chapter of the Mexican deal, a panel of experts could be convened to give a binding opinion on alleged environmental or human rights abuses, but they would not have powers to levy sanctions if a party had breached its commitments.
“The main safeguard we have is the same as the Mexico language, that partners shouldn’t lower standards to attract trade and investment,” said an EU official close to the negotiations. “Sometimes the court of public opinion is more powerful than a €10 million fine. The fact that the report is independent shouldn’t be underestimated.”
EU trade chief Cecilia Malmström insisted on Monday that the EU-Mercosur trade deal would contain environmental clauses that are “as ambitious as possible” and include “a reference to deforestation.” Despite the lack of enforcement powers, she said the deal is still a useful platform: “A trade agreement cannot … solve all the miseries of the world. But we can get a context to discuss these issues,” she said.
For the Commission, a Mercosur deal is a massive prize after 20 years of stop-start negotiations that would open up leading Latin American economies (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) to European cars and machinery. In terms of tariff reduction, it will be the EU’s biggest trade accord.
European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström | Angelika Warmuth/EPA
But the EU faces an uphill battle to win round its critics. More than 340 civil society groups will on Tuesday call for a suspension of the trade talks over the issue of environmental clauses.
“We are living through a climate emergency and we will oppose any trade deal that risks the destruction of the Amazon to produce beef for our tables, meat that will also undermine European agriculture,” said Green MEP Molly Scott Cato.
Angst about the Amazon
The EU has promised to end deforestation in its commodity supply chains by 2020, but practice has often fallen short of ideals, according to a letter signed by 600 environmental scientists in April.
Laura Kehoe, an Oxford University scientist who organized the letter, told POLITICO that any trade deal that does not prevent deforestation “would be a slap in the face of the school kids striking for the climate.”
If the Mercosur pact “fails to protect the Amazon and its people, the EU’s climate and humanitarian commitments will lose all credibility,” she added.
EU officials argue that beef exports will rise “by well under 1 percent of Mercosur production” while soy imports would be unaffected as zero tariffs already apply. “So keep it in perspective,” one source cautioned.
Brazil is a particular source of concern: Ranching, soy production and mining have driven Brazilian forest clearances, which last year claimed 3.2 million acres of tree cover — more than the rest of South America put together.
“There are some measures taken in Brazil that we certainly do not agree with,” Malmström said.
“We have many reports of violence from around the country” — Dinaman Tuxá, an indigenous leader in the Amazon
Since his election last year, Bolsonaro has been accused of accelerating deforestation by weakening Brazil’s environment ministry, blocking indigenous land rights claims, deregulating rainforest protections and encouraging farming and mining expansion in the Amazon.
The Brazilian government said that its authorities have adopted “several actions” to fight illegal deforestation and curb illegal exploitation of indigenous land since Bolsonaro’s election.
A government spokesman said that on June 5, “Operation Sovereign Amazon brought together 165 federal environmental agents [in] the largest force ever assembled for a mission of this type, with the mandate to perform law enforcement actions — including arrests — in seven states.”
Protected areas cover 41 percent of the Amazon, “an area almost equivalent to that of the entire European Union,” the spokesman added, stressing Brazil is committed to “sustainable development and the prevention of illegal deforestation.”
But official figures show that deforestation in Brazil soared to a record high in May with 739 square kilometers of rainforest cleared. Indigenous groups say that 19 hectares of rainforest are now being lost every hour in the Amazon.
Much of the logging takes place in a legal gray zone. To reach the rainforest, loggers first have to get past the indigenous people who live there, and that is spurring a surge in human rights abuses, according to Dinaman Tuxá, an indigenous leader.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of accelerating deforestation | Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images
“We have many reports of violence from around the country,” Tuxá said.
“Militias are being put together — by local agro-industry interests we suspect — to control indigenous people,” he said. One such group in the eastern state of Bahia had threatened to assassinate a leader and four members of his family, Tuxá said, while in his own community, 53 leaders were under protection from state agencies that have been stripped of funding and staff.
“I, for example, have to constantly change my route when I’m going home in order to keep safe,” he said.
In 2017, Brazil recorded the highest death toll of environmental defenders anywhere in the world, with the 57 murders and 32 land invasions that indigenous group APIB counts since January being “just the tip of the iceberg,” according to Tuxá.
“Accords like this only raise the level of violence against indigenous people,” he said. “We need to tell the EU that signing this free-trade agreement could lead to genocide in Brazil. If they sign this agreement, blood will be spilled.”
The word “genocide” has a broad definition in Brazil, covering assassinations, the enforced transfer of children and serious damage to a group’s physical or mental integrity. Survival International believes that uncontacted tribes face “annihilation” under Bolsonaro, who was quoted in a newspaper in 1998 saying: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry wasn’t as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated their Indians.”
Parliamentary pushback
Even if the EU and Mercosur build sufficient momentum for a political deal later this month, the deal could still run into severe headwinds in the European Parliament and in some 40 or so national or regional assemblies that will need to approve it.
Last month’s European election has given far greater voice to Europe’s Greens, and the center-left Socialists and Democrats are also pushing for Europe to use its leverage as the world’s biggest trade bloc to enforce environmental and labor standards.
Bernd Lange, a senior trade lawmaker from the Socialists and Democrats group, said that advisory groups made up of interested parties including green campaigners should be able to force a meeting of the panel of experts established in trade deals, or even launch EU-Mercosur consultations. Under the current system, only the EU and Mercosur can trigger such high-level steps.
Bernd Lange, a senior S&D MEP | Marc Dossmann/European Union
“We need to change the approach in order to have a clear level of escalation,” he said.
Jérémy Decerle, a member of the European Parliament, issued a statement on behalf of Macron’s Renaissance EU group on Monday, calling on EU officials to be “very careful” about any trade deal.
“Under no circumstances” could such agreements oblige the import of commodities produced “in contradiction with the principles of sustainability promoted by Europe at international level,” he said.
Some leaders of Mercosur countries “seriously offend the values we hold,” he continued.
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