Food, environment and health: what could happen with the Mercosur-EU agreement

Mercosur: it is obvious that the ‘invasion’ risk of uncontrolled products, without the safeguard clauses, is likely to exacerbate the risks to our health. But the real problem is that in the European Union there are ‘derogation’ authorisations that allow prohibited substances to be used by member countries to compete unfairly with their neighbours. So before lashing out at Mercosur, perhaps we need to put things in order in Europe

Quick Take — Mercosur: why we move forward

The Commission wants to apply it provisionally at the urging of Germany whose industry, faced with the fact that it can no longer buy cheap Russian gas and the invasion of Chinese products (e.g. cars), is in great difficulty and needs outlets.

France, with its agriculture, which is also in great difficulty, especially on the livestock and meat fronts, on the other hand, is opposed and disappointed.

Quick Take — Plant closures and surplus imports: the structural sugar crisis in Europe and Italy

22 out of 103 plants on the Continent closed. In Italy, the last remaining cooperative announced the temporary suspension of the Veneto plant.

Coprob-Italia Zuccheri, Italy’s only national sugar producer – two plants that manage the entire beet supply chain, from processing to storage – announces the seasonal suspension of the Veneto beet processing plant. For 2026 in Pontelongo (Padua) – 200 workers, both permanent and seasonal, and 2,000 conferring farmers – only the packaging site will be maintained, but ‘the structural modernisation project will be completed with the 3 million euro Pnrr project’.

Quick Take — Coffee producing countries are getting too hot to grow beans, according to an analysis

Five countries responsible for 75 per cent of the world’s coffee supply record an average of 57 extra days of coffee-damaging heat per year…

The plants, particularly the most valuable Arabica variety, suffer from temperatures above 30°C…

The worst affected coffee producing country was El Salvador, which recorded 99 extra days of plant-damaging heat. Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, accounting for 37% of global production, recorded 70 additional days [days added, in dark red below in The Guardian table] with temperatures above 30°C. Ethiopia, which accounts for 6.4 per cent of coffee production, recorded 34… and there small farmers produce 60 per cent to 80 per cent of their coffee, but received only 0.36 per cent of the funds needed to adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis.

Quick Take — European rice at risk: 60% of consumption from imports also because the European safeguard clause has expired

These days in Brussels a decision on the preferential duty system on arrivals from South East Asia. Rice industries: the already processed product costs the same as the raw product in the EU

Facilitated (and cheap) imports, global surpluses, together with the devaluation of the dollar, reduced freight rates and the impact of the climate crisis on producers are putting a strain on the resilience of the Italian rice supply chain.

The latest alarm for a concomitance of factors ‘that are not manageable by the supply chain’ comes from Airi, the Association of Rice Industries, which for some years now, with the expiry of the European safeguard clause that Italy had painstakingly managed to activate in Brussels, has been facing the resumption of duty-free imports from large producers, which have come to cover over 60% of total European purchases.

Rice that is largely ready-packed and packaged, sold at prices that are unsustainable for continental producers: today, via Rotterdam, milled white rice arrives at 400 euro per tonne; competing European varieties cost at least twice as much, 800-1,000 euro. In Italy, 400 euros buys a tonne of paddy rice, an agricultural raw material that then has to be transported, stored, processed and packaged… Il Sole 24 ore

On the safeguard clauses read here.