One month after its signing by Mrs von der Leyen, the EU-Mercosur agreement remains contentious, with the European Parliament scrutinising its legality. In Poland – one of a handful of Member States that voted against the deal – it remains a lightning rod for farmers’ grievances. And it’s not just farmers who are unfairly expected to absorb risks: new research co-authored by Igor Olech for Poland’s Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics spotlights structural loopholes in Mercosur’s sustainability architecture. Igor Olech reports from Poland.
Polish farmers’ opposition to the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement is not a matter of a single farming product or sector. It reflects how the agreement intersects with different parts of Polish agriculture and the Polish agri-food chain as a whole. For many farmers, the agreement with Mercosur represents not just cheaper trade but the overreach of a system they increasingly experience as unpredictable and beyond their control.
At the core of their reaction lies the perception of a market governed by two rulebooks that differ substantially (see for example here a short statement in Polish by Wiktor Szmulewicz, president of the National Council of Agricultural Chambers). Polish farmers operate under strict EU regulations on pesticides, animal welfare, and environmental protection, while in Mercosur countries production conditions are fundamentally different: Levels of pesticide use per hectare are several times higher than in Poland, and many active substances banned in the EU remain legal and widely used in South America. These differences translate directly into lower production costs and higher yields, not to mention less (if any) concern for the overall health of the environment: of soils, plants, livestock, and – most importantly – people.
How do different Polish food sectors perceive the agreement?
For farmers, the sense of injustice is accentuated by the fact that the EU bans certain substances domestically while allowing their manufacture and export abroad, effectively facilitating production systems that later compete on the same internal market. Thus, in the rare cases that environmental arguments came up in the Polish debate, it was largely because regulatory asymmetry is experienced as a direct economic penalty, not because the majority of farmers are primarily motivated by concern for ecosystems abroad.
This grievance is most acute in livestock production, particularly poultry and pig farming, which together form a central pillar of Polish agriculture. Poland is one of the EU’s largest poultry producers and exporters, and livestock production underpins rural economies across large parts of the country. These sectors are highly sensitive to feed costs, especially soybean meal, which accounts for more than 80% of Poland’s imports from Mercosur countries. Paradoxically, livestock farmers find themselves dependent on cheap imported feed from Mercosur countries. While propping up livestock production in the short term, these imports lock producers into dependence on a small number of external suppliers and expose them to global price volatility. After the supply-chain shocks of the last few years, this dependence has begun to feel like a strategic vulnerability.
Food security vs food self-sufficiency
In Poland, “food self-sufficiency” is understood as a prerequisite to “food security”, even in the academic literature. This echoes the definition of food security used in the days of the producing food within countries and the common market, rather than providing food security through global imports. Since then, for the EU, the emphasis has shifted to free trade rather than local production. While Polish society is largely in favour of the free market, the vast majority of Poles have little faith in the definition of “food security” used by the FAO, which is very neoclassical in spirit. This divergence has become more pronounced since the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of war in Ukraine.
Crop producers, especially those growing cereals, oilseeds, and sugar beet, are impacted by Mercosur differently but no less intensely. Poland is largely self-sufficient in cereals and sugar, which makes these markets highly sensitive to additional supply. Even relatively small increases in imports can depress prices, particularly in sectors operating on thin margins. Sugar beet growers are especially vocal despite the modest sugar quotas under Mercosur. Their reaction is shaped less by imminent volumes than by precedent: The recent surge of agricultural imports from Ukraine demonstrated how quickly “limited” access can disrupt a self-sufficient market and how slowly political safeguards tend to follow. For these producers, Mercosur signals a weakening of the protective barriers that underpin long-term investment decisions.
Horticulture occupies a more ambivalent position, but still contributes to overall resistance. Poland is a major EU producer of apples, berries, and processed fruit products. Direct competition from Mercosur in fresh produce may be limited due to climate and seasonality, yet concerns persist about competition in processed goods, rising compliance costs, and the erosion of standards-based differentiation. Horticulture is labour-intensive and cost-sensitive; even marginal price pressure can undermine profitability, which explains why fruit and vegetable producers often align with broader farmer protests.
Across these sectors, the common thread is limited capacity to pass costs up the chain. The Polish food industry is increasingly concentrated among processors and retailers, while farming remains fragmented and dominated by family operations. Larger processing firms are better equipped to absorb regulatory costs, invest in compliance systems, diversify markets, and manage trade shocks. Farmers, by contrast, remain price-takers. They absorb adjustment costs while capturing only a small share of the value added.
This structural imbalance helps explain why promises of compensation fail to reassure. Proposals for ex post compensation – paid only after losses materialise – are widely interpreted as confirmation that damage is expected and unavoidable. For farmers operating on tight margins, compensation after the fact does not restore lost contracts, broken supply chains, or closed farms. It reinforces the belief that policy is reactive rather than protective, and does not have in mind keeping domestic agricultural production.
The problem of environmental loopholes
What ultimately connects these sectoral vulnerabilities with broader fears around the EU-Mercosur agreement is not only the scale of liberalisation, but the way its safeguards operate in practice. The weak enforcement of environmental clauses shows that the agreement’s sustainability architecture is marked by structural loopholes rather than hard constraints. Environmental provisions rely heavily on due diligence, traceability, and satellite-based indicators of deforestation, yet these instruments operate primarily at the level of documentation and individual supply chains, not at the level of production geographies.
As a result, compliance does not necessarily entail disengagement from high-risk frontier regions; it can instead lead to the consolidation of sourcing among large, capitalised producers embedded in established frontier zones that are best able to demonstrate formal compliance. Empirical evidence from Brazil shows that, paradoxically, EU-linked trade can remain persistently dependent on frontier regions even under stricter sustainability governance, while enforcement is further weakened by discrepancies between deforestation-monitoring systems and the ambiguity around what constitutes a “serious breach” of environmental obligations.
This creates an enforcement gap: rules exist on paper, but their implementation is politically and evidentially difficult. For Polish farmers, it is relevant not because they follow satellite datasets or legal doctrine closely, but because EU producers face immediate and binding constraints, while imported products may continue to originate from regions where environmental and social costs are externalised, yet formally “cleansed” through compliance mechanisms.
In this sense, the Mercosur agreement does not merely expose farmers to competition; it exposes them to a system in which risk is managed through paperwork rather than prevented through spatial or regulatory equivalence, reinforcing the perception that the burden of adjustment falls disproportionately on domestic producers.
Conclusion
Livestock, cereals, sugar, and horticulture together account for the core of Polish agricultural output and employment. These sectors are the backbone of the countryside. This is why Mercosur has become more than merely a trade agreement, and rather a symbol of the era that has arrived, despite the expected instability of the future (last year’s CETA agreement, the recent trade deal with India, etc.). Negotiations have dragged on for decades, but protests intensified only when multiple pressures converged: expected stricter CAP conditionality, volatile markets, geopolitical shocks, and already rising input costs. Mercosur provided a focal point for expressing accumulated grievances.
What Polish farmers are ultimately rejecting is not trade itself (see text box above: Polish farmers often appeal for more market, but a fair market), but a system in which adjustment costs are imposed downward, enforcement outside the EU is uncertain, and the promise of a level playing field remains rhetorical. Seen this way, the opposition to the EU-Mercosur agreement is not a whim, but a response to a political economy that asks farmers to internalise costs in the name of public goods while competing in markets shaped by global asymmetries they did not choose.
Read the full study on Mercosur’s environmental loopholes authored by Igor Olech, Katarzyna Krupska and Katarzyna Kosior for the Institute of Agricultural and Food Economics in Warsaw:
The Problem of Enforcing Environmental Clauses in the EU–Mercosur Partnership Agreement in the Context of the Discrepancy in Deforestation Indices
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