Brussels/Baku/Buenos Aires, 13 November 2024 – As EU-Mercosur negotiations are speeding up, rumoured to be advancing around the G20 summit in Brazil next week and sealed by the end of 2024, a new report by Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe and Climate Action Network Latin America (CANLA) uncovers the climate-wrecking economic shock plans by Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei, and how the EU-Mercosur trade deal risks fueling Argentina’s social-ecological crisis and climate-breakdown. If ratified, the EU-Mercosur deal will boost harmful industries by increasing trade in products such as beef, soy, pesticides banned in the EU, combustion cars and raw materials that are among the biggest drivers of deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and displacement of Indigenous peoples in Argentina and other Mercosur countries.
Audrey Changoe, Trade and Investment Policy Coordinator at CAN Europe and co-author of the report, said:
“Milei’s climate denialism and ‘chainsaw policies’ combined with the outdated EU-Mercosur trade deal is a recipe for disaster. The EU-Mercosur deal is based on a text from 25 years ago and totally out of sync with the reality of the climate crises we face today. ‘Mileinomics’ coupled with the EU-Mercosur deal could cause critical ecological spillovers globally, as it will further threaten South America’s second-largest forest, the Chaco forest, also one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks.”
Fossil fuel expansion above democratic rights
Amid harsh repression of protesters, a sweeping economic reform bill was adopted in June, granting Milei unprecedented powers to roll back environmental and democratic rights with the aim of advancing the new Large-scale Investment regime (RIGI). The RIGI’s primary goal is to boost large-scale investments in oil, gas, mining, agribusiness and forestry sectors. While extractive industries profit from far-reaching economic benefits and investment protection under the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, RIGI does not include any social or environmental requirements for these industries. The creation of a special “Security Unit”, tasked to mobilize military forces in extractive regions, underscores the Milei administration’s intent to suppress social resistance to these destructive projects.
Maristella Svampa, renowned Argentinean environmentalist and co-author of the report, said:
“Milei’s reforms severely undermine our democratic rights. It includes the notorious ISDS mechanism allowing corporations to sue the provincial governments in secretive corporate courts, instead of our domestic courts, if they believe public policies, including environmental protection measures, interfere with their profits. Argentina is already the world’s most sued country in investor-state disputes, including claims by major fossil fuel giants such as Total Energies, BP and Repsol.”
The EU-Mercosur deal empowers Milei’s destructive agenda
The EU, which claims to be a champion of the green transition, is willing to do business with the climate-sceptic far-right president in Argentina and is rushing to finalise the environmentally damaging EU-Mercosur trade deal. The EU-Mercosur deal is set to exacerbate Argentina’s crisis, where poverty rates have reached historic levels of 55%, boosting unchecked extractivist industries, with damaging consequences for people’s fundamental rights to a healthy environment and a safe climate.
Three-quarters of Europeans want the deal to be scrapped if it leads to deforestation and environmental damage. Yet despite widespread opposition, including from small-scale and medium-sized European farmers, the European Commission is now trying to create a shortcut to changing the voting process which would bypass the scrutiny of national EU governments critical of the deal, undermining democratic rights, and violating the negotiation mandate.
Laura Restrepo Alameda from Climate Action Network Latin America said:
“No greenwashed annexes can fix this inherently bad deal. It is built to promote trade in products driving deforestation, land grabbing, massive pesticide use, carbon emissions and human rights violations. The deal pushes South America further into ecological collapse and props up a destructive neo-colonial economic system that drives social inequalities. The deal will severely affect the collective rights of Indigenous communities who already bear a disproportionate burden of the climate crisis and outrageously were never consulted about the deal.”
ENDS
For more information and media requests:
Jani Savolainen, Communications Coordinator, jani.savolainen@caneurope.org
Interviews available in EN, FR, ES, NL, PT, DE
Notes to editors:
- A summary of the report and the full report are available here.
