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The European Union has banned one of its largest exporters – Brazil – from supplying certain food products for consumption within the EU. As of September 3, Brussels has suspended imports of beef, poultry, eggs, and honey from South America’s largest country. This measure is as drastic as it is logical, resulting from Brazil’s failure to comply with European Union health regulations – specifically, the ban on using antimicrobials to boost animal growth. Brazil was unable to provide the required guarantees covering the entire life cycle of the animal, a fact that led to this ban, which had seemed imminent for several months already. As early as May, Brazil had been removed from the list of countries that comply with the European Union’s food safety requirements.
The regulation on the use of antimicrobial substances did not come out of nowhere. It existed even before the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement was provisionally implemented on May 1. At the time, Ursula von der Leyen “predicted” that the benefits of this agreement would be “real and visible.” After months of protests by farmers, who expressed massive concerns about opening the EU market to South America and the influx of non-compliant and harmful products – which the farmers had warned about repeatedly – European citizens were told something else: that food flows would be controlled and standards would be met. Four months after the agreement with the South American countries came into force, the European Union has now suspended imports of animal products from the largest one, Brazil. Until May 1, the architects of this agreement claimed that trade liberalization and strict health standards would coexist smoothly. The hypocrisy is blatant.
Concerns about growth promoters are not a figment of the imagination of bureaucrats in Brussels or farmers who have repeatedly raised the alarm about the public health risks posed by the implementation of Mercosur. Antimicrobial resistance is a real problem – and one that should not be ignored. The use of antibiotics as growth promoters is prohibited under EU law, which means that products derived from animals treated with these substances on Brazilian farms should be excluded from consumption. To claim that public health can be separated from how food is produced thousands of kilometers away is either dangerous naivety or a plain lie.
The European Commission is right to demand guarantees throughout the entire production chain – guarantees that Brazil cannot provide, at least for now. This is because the products it wants to bring to European consumers come from animals that have been given banned substances to make them grow faster.
That farmer who grows animals without growth promoters – with longer cycles and higher costs, but with a discipline passed down through generations – cannot compete on equal terms with an industrial system designed for profit. This is a reality that European farmers have repeatedly pointed out for months before the EU-Mercosur agreement came into force. When Brussels opens the EU market to hundreds of thousands of metric tons of beef containing banned substances, yet simultaneously claims that standards will be met, it is in fact playing a dangerous game – one that is by no means in the customers’ interests.
Europe’s farmers have been demanding for years not to be forced to compete with products that are not subject to the same constraints. Now, the health argument has proven them right, which is hardly surprising. This does not change the fact that Brussels itself politically imposed an agreement for EU consumers, which the rural community firmly rejected. It is a matter of food security, but also one of food sovereignty. A society that treats its food production or imports as just one detail among many, or that confuses low prices with abundance, is surrendering its sovereignty piece by piece. True prosperity requires a supply chain you can trust, an animal raised naturally, and a farmer who is not treated as an enemy of progress.