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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Most of Europe has long reached a population density that makes it effectively impossible to achieve self-sufficiency, so this argument is pointless.

This is going to be a good agreement if it is policed well enough that Mercosur countries are effectively forced to raise their food-production standards (because accepting imports doesn't automatically mean they can ignore regulations on suitability). Europe gets cheaper basic staples and sells LATAM more services and value-added products.

I'd rather help our Latin "cousins" get out of poverty, than having to deal with the insanity of US culture wars.

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Shipping food across the globe works great along with green deal. Such food quality is also questionable in many ways because transportability must be #1 priority.

As another commenter pointed out, beef is especially interesting. On one hand EU cries about greenhouse gas and how we should eat less meat. On the other hand goes to reduce price and increase production of beef which such moves. Pure hypocrisy.

I wonder if someone will double down on checking how Brazil is protecting its rains forests? Or will it just look the other way while Europeans eat cheap food that was grown in what was rain forest very recently?

If anything, deepening economic relationships will strengthen European influence over complex issues.

As for transport - enough of this stuff is already transported across the ocean (from LATAM but also South Africa, for example) that I doubt there will be much of a change.

Yeah, right. We currently see how that worked out with Russia. It turns out EU had little influence, but influence the other way was much stronger.

>Most of Europe has long reached a population density that makes it effectively impossible to achieve self-sufficiency, so this argument is pointless.

Current population density isn't an issue at all, but energy is.

The eu is a net exporter of agricultural products, what you are saying is plainly false.

The problem is rather the inputs, mainly from mineral sources, used for the production and imported from countries such as Morocco or Russia (before the war). Mercosur doesn't solve any of those problems, and will decrease the EU food autonomy as farms will disappear due to the LATAM dumping.

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