Asymmetrical Free Trade Agreements (FTA) use pesticides as new colonial goods. The population of the Mercosur countries suffers greatly from chemical violence, as shown by the large number of people who have already been poisoned by substances developed and often sold by countries of the European Union.

But trade between South American countries and the European Union in the last decades has established a global cycle of pesticide poisoning based on a neo-colonial economic model. “Pesticides were first imported to Brazil in the 1960s, but it was in 1975, with the creation of the National Development Plan (PND) that commercialization grew significantly. Under the PND, farmers were obliged to purchase pesticides to obtain rural credit.“[1]

So, despite having one of the strictest pesticide laws in the world at the time, Brazil became the largest pesticide consumer in the world in 1989 – the dual result of a booming industrial agribusiness and ineffective environmental regulation. That law even included the precautionary principle in its pesticide evaluation and registration standards. Since the year 2000, the bancada ruralista, the agribusiness lobby, has tried everything to overthrow this law. In 2022, Brazil drafted a bill on pesticides – the so-called poison package – that would mark a monumental setback for human rights in the country, exposing people of all ages, including farmers, workers, indigenous peoples and peasant communities, to hazardous substances with potentially devastating consequences for their health and well-being. Provisions in the draft bill would allow the use of carcinogenic pesticides and those that carry a higher risk of reproductive and hormonal problems, and malformations in babies.

Approving pesticides in a country with no monitoring structures and communication on the intrinsic danger of pesticides is practically a crime.

These risks are confirmed by Brazilian pesticide researcher Larissa Bombardi, who gave a lecture on “Toxic Trade – How the Mercosur Agreement Poisons People in Brazil and Europe” in March at the invitation of ASTM and Climate Alliance Luxembourg. She sees a growing asymmetry in these trade relations: “Rich nations export industrial and high-tech products, while poorer countries export basic goods like food and mining products. To this day, we are still reproducing the colonial model established by European colonial powers 500 years ago. Raw materials in former European colonies have already been exploited for centuries and these countries are now going through a new phase of colonialism, which has serious health and economic consequences for the local population.“

Larissa Bombardi is an associate professor at the Faculty of Geography, University of São Paulo – Brazil. She is one of the world’s leading references on the subject. She is the author of two atlases: “A Geography of Agrotoxins Use in Brazil and its Relations to the European Union” (2019) and “Geography of Asymmetries: Molecular colonialism and poisoning circle in Trade Relations between Mercosur and European Union” (2021).

After the publication of the Pesticide Atlas and its enormous media coverage, Larissa was confronted with anonymous calls and threats in Brazil and therefore left the country with her two sons in 2021. Since then, she has been working in exile in Belgium on the consequences of the pesticide business in Brazil. At CESSMA, the “Centre d’études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques“, she is currently developing the research project “Pesticides and the Impact on Women and Children in Brazil – Agroecology as a Path to Female Autonomy in the Face of the Physical and Emotional Effects of Pesticides”.

Trade in chemicals between the EU and Mercosur is currently worth € 6.3bn annually. As the EU has tightened its domestic pesticide restrictions, European chemical companies are taking full advantage of laws that allow the export of EU-banned chemicals to countries with more permissive standards or no oversight of pesticide use, such as Brazil, where pesticides are flourishing on fertile economic soil thanks to high government subsidies and low taxes granted to the manufacturing companies, as well as the negligible costs of national registration of active chemical ingredients.

Bombardi’s focus is on the four Mercosur countries[2], especially Brazil. In order to produce raw materials on a large scale for industrialized countries, Mercosur countries have invested in the expansion of agricultural land and in pesticides. A concrete example is soy production: between 2010 and 2019, according to one of the many examples in Bombardi’s publication “A Geography of Agrotoxins use in Brazil and its Relations to the European Union”[3], soy production in Brazil increased by 53.95 percent, while pesticide use increased by 71.46 percent over the same period. This means that the area used for soy cultivation in Mercosur countries alone has grown to the size of France.

Brazil has thus secured the inglorious title of the world’s largest consumer of pesticides: since 2010, more than one million tons of pesticides have been sprayed annually in the South American country’s agricultural sector, equivalent to 7.3 liters of agricultural poison per capita for each inhabitant of Brazil. Between January 1, 2019 and February 25, 2022, during the term of former President Jair Bolsonaro and his agro-pesticide-lobbying Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina, all but 1,635 new pesticides were approved in Brazil. Many of the agrochemicals approved in Brazil are, on the other hand, banned in the EU.

Pesticides approved in Brazil.

But this does not stop European agrochemical companies from selling pesticides containing substances banned in the EU to or in Brazil. The four groups – Syngenta Group (ChemChina), Bayer, Corteva (Dow Chemicals und Dupont) and BASF – shared about 70 percent of the global pesticide market in 2018.

According to Bombardi, more than 6,800 tons of pesticides banned in the EU itself were exported from the EU in 2018/2019, about half of them from France. Total exports of pesticides approved and banned in the EU amounted to about 51,000 tons in 2018 alone.

An assassination attempt of gender

Bombardi is among the experts who blame pesticides partly for Brazil’s high cancer rate – cancer is the nation’s second leading cause of death. “Lax pesticide use regulation and education cause major health consequences. Farmers often use pesticides without proper safety gear, with children being in the fields when spraying. There is an infanticide happening at Mercosur. With at least 27,000 killed babies, but an estimated number of unreported cases. In general, every two to three days, a human being dies because of toxic substances.“ One of the reasons this situation is getting out of control is that farmers are often unaware of the dangers of the chemicals they use, individually and in combination. Instead of applying one pesticide at a time, many farmers combine a herbicide, a pesticide and an acaricide, thus multiplying their dangerous effects and creating deadly mixtures. For many years, pesticides have simply been sold like soda, without the prescription that used to be required.

It is a myth that pesticides are necessary to feed the world, and that the adverse effects of pesticides on health and biodiversity are somehow a cost that modern society must bear.

How is this “chemical colonialism” linked to the Free Trade Agreement Mercosur? Research by the Heinrich Boell Foundation shows that, “if ratified, the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement would risk economic harm to the organic and agroecological farming sector in Mercosur countries, while undermining next-generation food, environmental and public health policy in both the EU and Mercosur.“ At the same time, the risk of pesticide-related human rights abuses increases significantly due to rising exports of dangerous pesticides from the EU to Mercosur countries. Finally, this would put pressure on regulators to speed up approvals of genetically modified, pesticide-dependent crops and expand their cultivation.[4] This means that the EU-Mercosur FTA would not only be a driver for more pesticides and GMOs but also weaken standards on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, public procurement would be affected by limiting the future of local development and food safety. Globally, the ratification of the Mercosur agreement would have the potential to accelerate climate tipping points through large-scale land use changes.

Europe’s hypocrisy in these negotiations is unbearable: while promising the next generation of “Farm to Fork” policies and stricter pesticide regulations at home, the EU continues to support the EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement with policies that exploit the more permissive environmental and health policies of its trading partners. This double standard will further expose vulnerable populations and the environment to toxic chemicals and undermine the European Green New Deal as well as a movement toward more sustainable agriculture in Mercosur countries.

The EU’s secret steps to undermine democracy.

For all the above-mentioned reasons, many European states have expressed their skepticism about the Mercosur agreement, including Luxembourg. The question is what consequences governments will draw from this skepticism in practice, because the Luxembourg government has merely frozen the agreement – which is in no way justifiable for a country that has ratified the ILO169 and is a member of the UN Human Rights Council.

In 2022, attempts were made to push the issue through bilateral agreements and to push for a so-called “splitting” of the planned free trade agreement. Specifically, in terms of decision-making, the European Commission is trying to split already negotiated agreements with third countries in which political issues of cooperation, trade relations or investment rules have been agreed upon into respective sections – politics and trade. This would mean that, for example, in the case of the EU-Mercosur agreement, the controversial trade part would no longer have to be decided unanimously by the Council and the approval of national parliaments would no longer be required.

EU Pestizid-Export Mercosur, 2019.

If the agreement were to be signed, 474 pesticides would probably enter the EU via vegetable imports, even though the EU has enacted provisions to ban and partially reduce the use of pesticides. Not only would citizens and parliaments thus face an erosion of democratic structures – the expected pesticide contamination would equally affect consumer protection and health care in the EU as well as in Mercosur countries.

The EU-Mercosur FTA would reduce or eliminate over 90% of existing tariffs on chemicals, some of which are as high as 18%. The European chemical industry will therefore not stop supporting the ratification of the agreement, believing that significantly lower tariffs will allow “steady growth” of chemical exports to Mercosur countries.

In June, negotiations between Europe and the Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) will continue and the countries will discuss further steps. Observers expect this year to be decisive for the Mercosur negotiations.

Luxembourg’s decision on glyphosate

A highly topical example is the herbicide glyphosate, which is used in Brazil, especially in coffee and sugar cane monocultures, and , with a permitted amount of 1mg/kg, is 10 times[5] higher in Brazil than in countries of the European Union: Luxembourg was the first EU member state to ban the use of pesticides containing glyphosate in January 2021. However, the Administrative Court overturned the national glyphosate ban in an appeal ruling on March 30, 2023. According to the Administrative Court, as long as the active ingredient is approved by the Commission throughout the EU (December 15, 2023), there is no objective reason for a special national regulation. Moreover, the judges said, there were no “special ecological or agricultural characteristics” in Luxembourg that would justify a national ban. No unacceptable risk to human or animal health or to the environment could be identified. This assessment is supported by a review report by four member states, which provides political dynamite: according to a report by the responsible safety authorities from France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary, glyphosate meets all the requirements to remain approved as an active substance for plant protection products in the EU from 2024.[6] This report – as well as the ruling of the Luxembourg Administrative Court – is contradicted by Bombardi’s field research.

 

Footnotes:

[1] https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02/brazils-fundamental-pesticide-law-under-attack/

[2] Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR): Planned free trade zone for Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay

[3] Der Atlas „A Geography of Agrotoxins use in brazil and its relations to the European Union“ ist derzeit auf Portugiesisch, Englisch und Spanisch erhältlich. Eine deutsche Übersetzung ist in Arbeit.

[4] https://eu.boell.org/en/2020/12/05/eu-mercosur-agreement-increasing-pesticide-use-and-gmos-and-undermining-healthy-food

[5] For malathion, an insecticide used, for example, in bean crops, the limits in Brazil are even 400 times higher than in the EU..

[6] https://www.agrarheute.com/pflanze/glyphosat-krebserregend-eu-verbot-wackelt-582352

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