What is the impact of norm differences between Mercosur and the European Union on Argentinian beef with a focus on the effect on Wallonian farmers.
Details
- Supervisors
- Faculty
- Degree label
- Abstract
- The EU-Mercosur agreement, provisionally in force since May 2026, is one of the most politically explosive trade deals in EU history — sparking farmer protests across Europe, a Parliament vote to refer it to the Court of Justice, and Belgium's own abstention in Council. At its center is beef. This thesis asks: will cheaper Argentinian beef actually hurt Belgian and Wallonian farmers, and how much? The key finding is that the tariff isn't the real barrier — the regulatory gap is. Mercosur producers operate under far looser pesticide, hormone, and deforestation standards, and current EU border checks can't detect how meat was actually produced, only whether banned residues appear in the final product. To test whether tariff cuts alone can override this gap, the thesis uses the CETA agreement with Canada as a natural experiment, running a difference-in-differences analysis on fifteen years of trade data. The result: tariff liberalization alone, without regulatory convergence, produces real but modest trade effects — Canada still supplies less than 0.5% of its global beef exports to the EU despite preferential access since 2017. Projected onto Mercosur, this implies 13,000–15,000 additional tonnes per year, which over seven years lands close to the official 99,000-tonne quota — suggesting the quota will eventually fill, but slowly. For Wallonia, the risk is real even if the EU-wide impact stays contained: Belgian Blue beef can't compete on price, and thin margins leave little room to absorb pressure before a reactive safeguard mechanism kicks in. The core conclusion: what matters most isn't the quota number, but whether the EU actually enforces its mirror clauses and deforestation rules before that quota fills.