Acordo Mercosul-UE: Thomas Andrew O'Keefe (Mercosur Consulting Group)

EU-MERCOSUR: Does Their New Association Agreement Mean Much?

By Thomas Andrew O’Keefe*

Mercosur Consulting Group, August 6, 2019

Press conference about the trade agreement between the Mercosur and the EU / Palácio do Planalto / Creative Commons

After nearly two decades of intermittent negotiations, the European Union and the four core MERCOSUR nations (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) have finally inked a trade agreement, but its real impact won’t be felt for years, if ever. When the negotiations began in the mid-1990s, the EU was the largest trading partner of the MERCOSUR countries, and the United States was number two. Today China is in first place, the European Union is second, and the U.S. is fourth, behind intra-Latin American trade (EU investors, however, continue to have the largest stock of foreign direct investment assets in the MERCOSUR region). When ratified, the EU-MERCOSUR Association Agreement, signed in Brussels on June 28, will exempt a little more than 90 percent of two-way trade from tariffs.

• About 93 percent of MERCOSUR exports will eventually obtain duty-free access into the EU market, the bulk as soon as the agreement comes into effect. Agricultural commodities such as beef, chicken, corn, eggs, ethanol, honey, pork, rice, and sugar only get reduced duties, with many also subject to quotas. Another 100 MERCOSUR agricultural items are completely excluded from any type of preferential treatment.
• Some 91 percent of European exports will get duty-free access to MERCOSUR, but gradually as tariffs are reduced over a 10-year period. The phase-out is over 15 years in the case of European automobiles, furniture, and shoes. MERCOSUR tariffs on the remaining 9 percent of primarily EU manufactured goods will remain in place permanently.
• The agreement offers service providers from any signatory country full access to the markets of all the other signatory states.

MERCOSUR showed greater flexibility with the EU on agricultural subsidiesthan it had with the United States, a position that contributed to ultimate rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Subsidies in the EU-MERCOSUR agreement are permitted if “necessary to achieve a public policy objective.” The MERCOSUR countries also capitulated on the use of anti-dumping tariffs on intra-hemisphere trade. The new accord, however, does authorize governments to impose a duty that is less than the margin of dumping if it adequately removes injury to the affected domestic industry. It also includes provisions for ensuring that sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures as well as technical norms are not abused and become disguised impediments to free trade, although it permits enforcement of the European “precautionary principle” notion to restrict the importation of genetically modified food, for example, where the risks to health are not scientifically conclusive.

The agreement – now being “legally scrubbed” and translated into the EU’s 23 official languages – faces an elaborate, multi-year ratification process in the EU, where individual countries and the European Parliament must approve it, as well as each MERCOSUR government. Agricultural forces are already lining up in many European countries in opposition. In the meantime, the accord’s greatest impact is a signal by Brazilian President Bolsonaro and Argentine President Macri that they’re making progress on their stated objective to return MERCOSUR to its original trade focus – in contrast to their predecessors – and to claim an economic “victory” when growth in both countries remains stagnant.

• Despite the flexibility MERCOSUR showed on agricultural subsidies and anti-dumping, its main sticking points with the United States in the FTAA, a free trade agreement with the United States seems remote as the Trump administration – in contrast to the Europeans – is unlikely to offer meaningful concessions based on the lesser developed status of the MERCOSUR countries. Neither will the Association Agreement with the EU reverse or even slow the region’s shift toward trade with China and the rest of Asia. 

August 6, 2019

* Thomas Andrew O’Keefe is the President of New York City-based Mercosur Consulting Group, Ltd. and a lecturer at Stanford University. He is the author of Bush II, Obama, and the Decline of U.S. Hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.