With the recently signed EU-Colombia Joint Declaration on Environment, Climate Action and Sustainable Development, the EU’s environmental diplomacy can, at least on paper, claim another victory for itself.
The Declaration includes an action and cooperation plan and is part of the EU’s broader global effort to engage its trade partners in the fight for a series of stated objectives related to climate action, biodiversity, deforestation and ecosystems conservation.
The notion that Brussels should be a global norm setter when it comes to the environment, particularly in the area of trade, is the ambition of French president Emmanuel Macron who has made setting global trade standards based on fair and green objectives one of his flagship policies. With France also holding the rotating European Council presidency until mid-2022, the French president is now uniquely well-positioned to give substance to some of those lofty goals.
Mirror clauses: a cornerstone in EU policy.
At the heart of Macron’s programme is the adoption of “mirror clauses” in all EU trade agreements. These would require all EU trade partners to reciprocate the same standards in production as EU farmers, which are often stringent and comprehensive, so that European farmers “are not undercut by the prices offered by producers from other third countries who are not obliged to adhere to the same environmental rules.”
Next to increasing animal welfare, this is hoped to end the EU’s so-called “imported deforestation” – products, such as beef or soy, being imported into the Single Market after their production has caused massive environmental damage due to lax environmental laws in the producing third countries.
Macron’s enthusiasm for mirror clauses isn’t unconditionally shared across the EU or even its institutions, with scepticism coming especially from the more free-trade minded countries that would rather avoid what they consider France’s push for increased protectionism. However, Macron is far from without allies, as many EU lawmakers favour greater reciprocity and trade based on European core values.
Coalition of the willing.
This became apparent during a high-level conference organised by the French Beef Association (Interbev) in Brussels on February 10th, uniting three EU Ministers of Agriculture and ten Members of the European Parliament, who together represented six EU Member States, in a call to rapidly apply reciprocal measures for agricultural production standards in international trade. “We must create a political momentum on reciprocity of agri-food standards”, French Agriculture Minister Julien Denomandie insisted, stressing that Paris will expedite work towards Council conclusions regarding this matter.
Spain’s Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, agreed with his French colleague, admitting that “I myself have changed my mind between equivalence clauses and reciprocity clauses over time… We and our trading partners have an internal task to perform.” This admission indicates an important shift in thinking on this matter within the Spanish government, which in November last year decided to side with France after having been mute on the issue for long.
Indeed, comments from several speakers at the conference are representative of a growing alliance led by Paris against opponents of mirror measures in the EU, whom French MEP Eric Andrieu implicitly accused of “being afraid of mirror measures”, arguing that the EU should trust the power of the Single Market as a sufficient incentive for trade partners to adopt reciprocity.
Support for making mirror clauses mandatory in future trade agreements is likely to increase within the EP. The threat to “no longer vote for free trade treaties that don’t contain mirror clauses” was levelled by Benoit Lutgen (Belgium) in a strong statement that could turn the issue into a potentially non-negotiable hot potato, making the rapid passing of new FTA’s an ever more arduous undertaking.
This was finally underlined by Austria’s Agriculture Minister Elisabeth Köstinger, who made the inclusion of European agricultural standards a requirement for market access: “In addition to minimum standards, our agricultural standards must be sufficiently taken into account in the negotiations of future free trade agreements. This is, in my view, an essential basic condition for further market openings.”
Time to act.
Austria is thus complementing the emerging “European consensus” on including mirror measures in the EU’s environmental diplomacy toolkit at a time when the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen is taking large strides towards a more unified European approach on climate change mitigation and adaptation in the energy sector. With consent finally achieved on the long-awaited Taxonomy, and initiatives such as the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) having come to fruition, it’s high time that Brussels tackle trade as another corner stone of this environmental policy.
With support for mirror clauses rising, the EU may finally be closer to making them a reality in its trade relations than ever before – and setting a global standard for sustainable production standards.
Follow EU Today on Social media:
