The EU–Mercosur free trade agreement entered provisional force on Friday after more than two decades of negotiation, with Brazilian soy, beef, coffee, cocoa and forest products now flowing into the EU for nearly eight months ahead of the EUDR’s hard 30 December 2026 compliance start. That is according to Sofia Sanchez Manzanaro, writing for Euractiv, who reports that the Amazon-focused rhetoric once dominating opposition to the deal has been quietly displaced by farmer politics and geopolitical pressures.
The eight-month gap has emerged as the central concern for Green MEP Kai Tegethoff of Volt, who has urged Brussels not to delay the regulation further. It comes as Wood Central reported earlier today that Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall held the EUDR line on wood and paper but pushed leather out without reopening the regulation’s core legal text, with all seven covered commodities retained inside Annex I and only leather hides proposed for category-level removal.
Wood Central understands the eight-month gap will apply equally to Brazilian and Uruguayan pulp, paper, and timber shipments under the new agreement, with the same Annex I scope that Brussels confirmed today, covering forest products that have long flowed into European paper mills under existing tariff regimes.
French leaders have remained the deal’s most consistent opponents whilst cycling through rationales from Amazon protection to pesticide concerns, with Mercosur a rare political issue cutting across the French left and right. President Emmanuel Macron’s 2019 attack on then-Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro over Amazon deforestation marked the high point of EU climate-driven trade scepticism, coinciding with the launch of the European Green Deal.
The agreement includes an environmental annex, agreed years after the core 2019 text, with Lula da Silva’s 2023 return to the Brazilian presidency reopening negotiations on reinforced deforestation commitments and a clause that makes the Paris Agreement an essential element of the deal. A future Brazilian government walking back from its climate commitments could provide grounds to suspend the agreement, with the trade pillar also binding both parties to a non-regression principle on environmental standards.
Officers from Brazil’s federal environmental enforcement agency IBAMA approach a truck loaded with tropical hardwood logs at a Pará checkpoint, the kind of state-level enforcement at origin that EUDR-bound traders must verify ahead of the regulation’s 30 December 2026 compliance start. Pulp, paper and timber shipments under the new Mercosur agreement now sit inside the same Annex I scope as Brazilian soy, beef, coffee and cocoa. (Photo Credit: Vinícius Mendonça / IBAMA via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
David Kleimann, a Brussels-based trade expert at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, told Euractiv the agreement strengthens Lula’s hand on a domestic political priority, whilst Irene Mia of the International Institute for Strategic Studies called the outcome a significant test of climate diplomacy and a potential template for future trade deals.
Roderick Kefferpütz, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Germany’s Green party, told Euractiv that environmental concerns remain highly relevant even as geopolitical pressures shift the balance. “Geopolitics hasn’t simply trumped climate concerns,” Mr Kefferpütz said, with implementation now the test of whether the deal lives up to its environmental billing.
The Mercosur deal will operate under provisional application until ratification clears all 27 EU member states, with the EUDR’s 30 December 2026 start the only formal due diligence brake on Brazilian agrifood and forest-product shipments now flowing under the agreement.
