EU & South America: 450 organisations coalition wants to stop the the EU-Mercosur agreement due to its negative impacts to the environment and to labour and human rights
“Coalition launches to stop EU-Mercosur trade deal”, 16 March 2021
...450 civil society organisations have launched a coalition to stop the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, warning that it would be detrimental to climate, biodiversity, labour and human rights. The controversial trade deal, if passed, would allow for the free trade of beef, amongst other products, between the EU and Mercosur countries, namely Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. The coalition said in their founding statement yesterday that the deal is based on an out-dated 20th century model of trade that “serves corporate interests at the expense of planetary boundaries and animal welfare, and drives untenable social inequalities.” The agreement runs the risk of incentivising the destruction and biodiversity collapse of the Amazon through livestock expansion and would “give a strong political signal” of approval to ongoing human rights abuses linked to the supply chains implicated in the deal, according to their statement...The proposed agreement would be a “direct contradiction” to the European Green Deal, according to a group of researchers led by the University of Oxford and the Nature Conservancy...In particular, the lack of any mechanism to trace the origin of commodities like beef and soy would run a “high risk” of driving deforestation. The paper also said that international frameworks, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), were overlooked in the drafting of the agreement. Rather than exacerbating the climate crisis, trade should be used as an incentive for countries to adhere and align themselves to the Paris Agreement commitments, which would be a “particularly powerful policy option given the lack of legal mechanisms to enforce international agreements,” the report states...