Unlike the EU Council, the European Parliament is not expected to decide quickly on the safeguard measure specific to the EU-Mercosur trade agreement (see EUROPE 13726/26). Indeed, the seconded experts from the EU Member States are already expected to approve the draft regulation on Thursday 6 November in the Council, so that the permanent representatives can quickly green light it. With respect to MEPs, however, the proposal was only debated on Monday 3 November by the Committee on International Trade (INTA), during which there was no question of quickly giving the proposal a green light without amendments.
The rapporteur, Gabriel Mato (EPP, Spanish) – who supports the EU-Mercosur agreement – welcomed the draft regulation. However, he suggested shorter timeframes than those proposed by the Commission for activating a safeguard. He considers the thresholds for activating an investigation and the 21-day period for applying a provisional safeguard in the most serious cases to be “reasonable”.
His colleague Brando Benifei (S&D, Italian) also welcomed the proposal, but felt that Parliament had “room for manoeuvre to improve it”.
During the discussion in the INTA Committee, only those MEPs who were firmly opposed to the EU-Mercosur agreement took the floor after these first two MEPs. For Benoît Cassart (Renew Europe, Belgian), Manon Aubry (The Left, French), Jessika van der Leeuwen (EPP, Dutch) and Nina Carberry (EPP, Irish), the safeguard measure is proof that the EU-Mercosur agreement will have a negative impact on European farmers.
They believe that the mechanism remains complicated to activate. Paolo Garzotti, Head of the Latin America and Caribbean Unit at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade and Economic Security, refutes this observation. European farmers will only have to demonstrate a price drop of more than 10% on imported products compared to European products for an investigation to be launched, he repeated. He also stressed that: “We couldn’t have made it any simpler than that”.
But MEPs are also concerned about unfair conditions between producers from the two blocs: the draft regulation does not address the problem of imports from Mercosur that do not comply with European sanitary and phytosanitary standards.
Compatibility of the EU-Mercosur agreement with the European treaties. In a sign that the agreement is giving rise to widespread concern, a group of 59 MEPs from the Greens/EFA, The Left, EPP and S&D groups has announced that next week it will table a motion for a resolution questioning the compatibility of the EU-Mercosur agreement with the European treaties.
These MEPs are questioning the legal validity of the rebalancing mechanism negotiated between the EU and Mercosur and the decision to separate the trade part of the agreement in order to get it ratified quickly. They are also concerned about respect for the precautionary principle, given the potential failure of Mercosur exporters to comply with EU sanitary and phytosanitary standards.
“Beyond the differences of opinion on the merits or drawbacks of the agreement, we believe it is essential to preserve the European legal order, to ensure respect for the acquis communautaire and to ensure sincere cooperation between the European institutions”, explain the MEPs in a joint press release.
The text will be put to the vote at the plenary session in late November.
See a provisional version of the draft resolution: https://aeur.eu/f/j9v (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)