Who's afraid of the French farmers?
The answer, as the fracas over a EU-Mercosur trade deal shows, is everyone
French farmers, who are never short of grievances, have turned their ire on a trade deal struck by the EU and Mercosur, a South-American trade bloc.
They worry that Argentine beef and other foodstuffs will be allowed undercut local producers who have to meet stringent health and environmental rules.
This month farmers took to the streets across France. Many have blocked roads with tractors, smashed windows with concrete blocks or dumped manure outside public offices. The most militant group has threatened "chaos" in the run-up to the festive season.
These strongly made arguments got the attention of politicians. Prime Minister Michel Barnier said he "understood the anger" of farmers and vowed to stand firmly against the draft treaty. President Emmanuel Macron said the EU could not open its market to "massive imports of products that do not meet its standards".
Centre-right heavyweight Xavier Bertrand was even more vocal. "Our plate is not a rubbish bin," he tweeted (associating Latin Americans with garbage is not the preserve of Trump fans).
This week the government submitted a declaration against the Mercosur agreement "as the European Commission envisages it". The National Assembly approved it by a Putinesque majority of 87%. The 70 (mostly left-wing) MPs who rejected the statement found it too soft: in their view any trade deal with Mercosur should be rejected. In the upper chamber, all but one lone senator backed the government's objections.
This is all the more remarkable as the French parliament is otherwise hopelessly divided. After a snap election in June, the painfully assembled cabinet has nowhere near a working majority. Its inability to get a budget approved could lead to Barnier's downfall in December.
In the face of government paralysis and looming financial crisis, French politicians are at each other's throats. But when it comes to supporting farmers, who represent 2.5% of the workforce, they speak with one voice.
Such unanimity smacks of hysteria. The Talmud rules that if a defendant is condemned by every single judge, the conviction must be quashed as it shows that the accused did not get a fair hearing. And so it goes for the Mercosur deal in France.
It is a balanced, comprehensive trade agreement – and a great chance for Europe. The deal was reached in 2019 after 20 years of on-and-off negotiations with the founding members of Mercosur - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Once ratified by a sufficient number of EU countries, it will open a market of 300,000 consumers to a vast range of their products.
The EU currently has a trade surplus with Mercosur despite high tariffs imposed by Latin Americans on cars, machinery, textiles, IT equipment, wine and others goodies. Imagine how much more of these things European companies will sell in South America if they are given unfettered access.
French politicians are fixated on farming, but it is only a minor aspect of the proposed deal. And it doesn't institute anything like free trade. Agricultural imports from Mercosur will be allowed into the EU at little or no tariff subject to strict quotas: 1.2% of overall EU consumption for beef, 1.4% for poultry, 1% for sugar.
Moreover, French winemakers and dairy farmers will benefit as cheap brie and Beaujolais hit the shelves from Manaus to Tierra del Fuego. Other French producers, to be sure, will suffer. Beef farmers, for instance, will be undercut by cattle ranchers from the pampas.
Any trade agreement creates losers as well as winners. But typically – and this is certainly the case for the Mercosur agreement – the latter vastly outnumber the former. And the biggest winners of all are consumers in both blocs. It is wrongheaded to forego such benefits for the sake of the few who are adversely affected: better to compensate them.
The objections on health and environmental grounds are also bunkum. It is true that South American producers are able to use pesticides on crops and growth antibiotics in livestock that are banned by the EU. But these are explicitly barred from entering Europe under the draft agreement.
Naysayers counter that the union has weak safeguard systems. But those seem to work with Canada, whose trade deal with Europe, CETA, has been in force since 2017 (provisionally, as EU ratification is still pending). Canadian beef exporters have not been able to meet their full quotas because of Brussels' fussiness about standards.
French opposition to Mercosur sets the country on a collision course with its EU partners. This obstructionist stance seems all the more striking as Emmanuel Macron has never stood for economic nationalism.
At a time of rising populism, he managed to win two presidential elections by championing the EU and - even more boldly for a French politician - globalisation. Only a year ago, he resolutely defended the CETA agreement with Canada in the face of a similar farmers' uprising.
What is going on? The chorus of official and unofficial protests stems from two French crises, for which the Mercosur deal serves as the perfect scapegoat. The first is long-term decline of French agriculture. A country that used to be the breadbasket of Western Europe is now a net food importer within the EU. It is only the third largest exporter in the bloc, behind the Netherlands and Germany.
Many French farmers are struggling and deserve attention. But the reasons for their woes are almost entirely domestic. Paris has piled on agricultural regulations to achieve carbon neutrality, on top of EU environmental rules that are already the toughest in the world.
The farmers' problems run deep. Explaining them takes time and effort - never mind tackling them. It is much easier to mobilise public support by blaming trade, a perennial bogeyman in France.
The other crisis is of a more political, and hopefully less ingrained, nature. Following his disastrous decision to call a snap election, Macron has become a lame duck. The Prime minister's own hold on power is slipping fast, amid rising support from the far right and the left for a vote of no-confidence.
Whenever Michel Barnier falls, Macron does not have to resign but he will face pressure to do so. No wonder both men have sought to stave off disaster by finding a simulacrum of consensus on a non-issue.
Between appeasing farmers and unleashing chaos, they chose appeasement and they will have chaos.