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Comment by NoboruWataya | Hacker News Reader

I am from a country (Ireland) that has a huge agricultural sector so I sympathise with the argument that this will be bad for European farmers. That said, food production in the EU is already largely kept alive by subsidies so if this deal makes life more difficult for farmers I can see the result being higher subsidies to compensate rather than the large scale closure of European farms. Which obviously isn't great but possibly a fair price to pay for the deal as a whole (I don't know enough about it honestly).

But I think the deal is quite positive from a geopolitical perspective. For one, any deal we make without the US just makes us more resilient in the event of a trade war that looks increasingly inevitable. Obviously Mercosur can't replace the US but it's a step in the right direction. And strengthening ties between the EU and Latin America makes it more difficult for Russia and China to bring that continent into their sphere of influence.

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It replaces the US in the most beneficial ways for Europe, I would say. Mercosur is mostly commodities and no manufactured products, think iron, food (and rare earth). That helps tremendously with the idea of building or improving European own industry. There's a lot of incentives to mercosur to import european machinery and start it's own industrial sector.

All in all, mercosur already has strong ties with western europe (Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy), both historic-cultural and economic, I see this as a huge win

I am from a country with a not so huge agricultural sector (Slovakia) and think that anything that brings food prices down while not hugely affecting quality will be good. Food in the EU is overpriced relative to the rest of the world. There are reasons for that I can understand but still.

What do you mean by "not so huge agricultural sector (Slovakia)"? I thought Slovakia had a more agrarian economy compared to the more industrialised Czechia.

It's only about 2% of GDP, comparable to the Czechs. Fun fact - Slovakia is a global leader in car production per capita, making around 1 million cars last years with 5 million inhabitants.

A consistent argument against the deal was precisely that the Mercosur partners won’t be able to stick to the same quality standards that we impose on the Bloc, or they might but then their prices will have to go up to accommodate the added bureaucracy and expectations in terms of agricultural practices.

Another more cynical take is that were simply offloading to poorer countries the greenhouse gas emissions of our agriculture.

I think quality standards are a bit different from other trade barriers like tariffs and quotas. We in the EU are importing lots of foods from over the world and the quality standards are already in place and checked (or not, in any case we have to police this ourselves), so probably not much will change for e.g. Argentinian beef in that regard.

> but then their prices will have to go up

But again their prices would have to account for this whether they are trading inside the trade bloc or exporting to the EU.

> Another more cynical take is that were simply offloading to poorer countries the greenhouse gas emissions of our agriculture.

But we are doing this already. And if the issue becomes too big to ignore, we already have a solution, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, so let's apply that to agriculture too.

There’s been a recent scandal concerning the watering of tomatoes in Morocco. I’m sure we test food quality where we can, but it won’t be feasible to ensure all producers grow their food ‘properly’.

European farmers are held to a higher standard that can be controlled with random testing any time, can we do the same for external partners? Can we prevent them from selling sugar syrup as honey, as was controversially happening in the UK? Is the ‘organic’ label as strict for, say, Peru?

This isn’t rhetoric. Yes, we have solutions and can mitigate everything. The issue that many have is that the affordances of a free-trade deal disincentive the practices we demand of local farmers. A continent struggling with suicide and bankruptcy among farmers might want to rethink how it ensures its own food security in the coming decades of destabilised climate and growth seasons.

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