EU-Mercosur: The pesticide double standard

In January 2020, the European Commission decided not to renew the authorisation of chlorpyrifos. The European Food Safety Authority had concluded the previous summer that no safe level of exposure could be established. The concerns included developmental neurotoxicity — concerns about effects on children's neurological development — and unresolved questions about genotoxicity. By November 2020, maximum residue levels in food and feed were lowered to 0.01 milligrams per kilogram — effectively zero.

In May 2025, the parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants — including the European Union, which had nominated chlorpyrifos for global phase-out in 2021 — added it to the list of substances the international community has committed to eliminating globally. A persistent organic pollutant is a substance that persists in the environment, accumulates in the food chain, and travels long distances from where it was used. The Stockholm Convention is the treaty by which the world agrees, formally and in writing, that some chemicals should not exist in commerce anywhere.

So Europe banned chlorpyrifos for use on its own farms in 2020, on health grounds. Then in 2025, alongside the rest of the world, Europe agreed it should not be used anywhere.

In 2020 — the same year as the EU ban — 8,800 tonnes of chlorpyrifos were sold in Brazil, including volume manufactured by Ascenza Agro SA, a company operating in Portugal. EU territory. EU jobs. EU corporate taxes. EU export licences.

This piece is about what it means to ban a substance twice, and to manufacture it for export in between.

The shape of the loop

The pattern is not specific to chlorpyrifos. In 2018 and 2019, EU member states and the United Kingdom approved exports totalling 140,908 tonnes of pesticides banned for use in European fields.

The destinations are concentrated. Brazil is one of the largest single markets. So is the rest of the Mercosur bloc. So are several African and Asian countries with regulatory regimes the EU itself classifies as weaker than its own.

And the chemicals come back. Not the same molecules, but their residues — on soy that feeds European livestock, on fruit and vegetables on European supermarket shelves, on the meat that depends on the soy. The "import tolerance" system in EU food law sets maximum residue levels for substances banned in Europe, calibrated to permit a level of imported residue that European-grown food cannot legally contain. A substance Europe bans for its own farmers is permitted, in residue form, on imported food consumed by the same population the ban was meant to protect.

What that means for European consumers is a question that goes well beyond pesticides and well beyond this trade deal. It deserves its own treatment, and I will come back to it. This piece is about something narrower and, I think, sharper: the policy architecture that produces the loop in the first place, and what it does to the people who are asked to compete against the substances it permits.

The export side

The 8,800 tonnes of chlorpyrifos sold in Brazil in 2020 are one substance in one year in one country. The full picture is larger.

In 2018, EU companies notified plans to export approximately 81,600 tonnes of pesticides banned for use on European farms, to 85 non-EU destinations. More than half by weight was destined for low- and middle-income countries. By 2024, the number of distinct banned chemicals appearing in those export notifications had reached 75, nearly doubling since 2018. The trade has not contracted since the EU promised to end it. It has expanded.

The reason it has expanded is that the EU committed, in 2020, to bringing forward legislation to stop it — and has not. The European Commission's Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, published in October 2020, included a commitment to "ensure that hazardous chemicals banned in the European Union are not produced for export." A first legislative draft was promised by 2023. As of May 2026, it has not arrived. The 2024 European elections delayed the file. The new Commission has folded the question into a broader chemicals action plan and a "Vision for Agriculture and Food" that, in February 2025, committed to "assessing" a principle prohibiting entry of products produced with hazardous EU-banned pesticides.

The pattern of delay is not unique to this file. A recent report by ClientEarth and the European Environmental Bureau found that the Commission has missed its statutory three-month deadlines on REACH chemical restrictions by an average of two years, with delays ranging from thirteen to forty-seven months. A chemicals regulation researcher quoted in the coverage described the institutional inertia as "extremely frustrating." The export-ban file is one item in a longer list. The list is the point.

What France tried

In the absence of EU-level action, two member states have legislated unilaterally. France was first.

The French loi Egalim, adopted in 2018 and effective from 1 January 2022, prohibited the manufacture, storage and export from French territory of plant protection products containing active substances non-approved in the EU on health or environmental grounds. France was the first country in the world to do this. The agrochemical industry challenged the law on constitutional grounds. The French Constitutional Council upheld it. Belgium passed a similar law in 2025. Germany has made commitments at the ministerial level.

The law has been undermined by three problems.

The first was an executive decree issued in March 2022 — three months after the law came into force — providing that the export ban would not apply where a substance's EU authorisation had been allowed to expire without a formal non-renewal decision. This carved out, among others, the four neonicotinoid insecticides progressively banned across the EU since 2018 to protect pollinators. By late 2022, France had authorised the export of more than 1,800 tonnes of products containing imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam and fipronil — to destinations including Japan, Ukraine, Guatemala and South Africa. The decree was challenged by the NGO Générations Futures and annulled by the Conseil d'État in March 2024.

The second is a drafting gap. The Egalim law covers "plant protection products" — finished formulations sprayed by farmers. Pure active ingredients shipped abroad to be formulated elsewhere appear to fall outside its scope. In 2023, France authorised the export of 7,294 tonnes of banned pesticides in total, of which 4,517 tonnes — sixty-two per cent — were pure active substances. Two-thirds of that volume was destined for Brazil.

The third is geographical. The French environment ministry has acknowledged that companies contracted on French territory are shipping product from warehouses on the territory of other EU member states, where the Egalim law does not apply. The ministry's own stated position is that the only durable fix is an EU-wide ban — the legislation that has not arrived.

Why this is the unfair-advantage argument

The chemicals at the centre of the protest — chlorpyrifos, atrazine, acephate, chlorothalonil, the neonicotinoids — are not chemicals the Mercosur countries developed or manufactured for themselves. They are produced and sold globally by European and American corporations.

The structural picture is straightforward. Five firms — Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva and FMC — control more than 70 per cent of the global pesticide market. Three are European-headquartered, two American. In 2024 alone, EU-headquartered companies among them exported around 18,000 tonnes of pesticides banned for use within the EU; more than 80 per cent of those exports went to Brazil. The substance Europe has decided is too dangerous for European farmers to use is, in many cases, supplied to European farmers' competitors by the European industrial economy.

There is a complication worth naming. Some of these substances address pest pressures more intense in tropical and sub-tropical conditions than in Europe. Part of the substance gap reflects agronomic difference, not just regulatory difference. That part of the story belongs in a later piece, when this series turns to the Mercosur perspective.

But the agronomic complication does not dissolve the policy point. The cost gap on agrochemical inputs between European and Mercosur producers is not, in any meaningful sense, a fact of geography. It is a policy outcome. European chemical companies, operating largely on European soil, sell to European farmers' competitors substances that European farmers are forbidden to buy. The forbidden product is supplied, lawfully and at scale, by the same economy that forbids it.

European farmers compete, on commodity markets, against products grown with chemicals their own countries' industry produced for that purpose. The compliance cost is borne by the European farmer. The manufacturing margin is captured by the European chemical sector. And the product, eventually, returns, with residues of banned pesticides, ending up on European plates.

The legal side

That return is not an accident of enforcement. It is permitted by design.

EU food law sets maximum residue levels — MRLs — for pesticides on food and feed. For substances authorised in the EU, the MRL is set on the basis of European agricultural practice and dietary exposure assessment. For substances not authorised in the EU but still used internationally, the same regulation provides for a separate mechanism: the "import tolerance." An import tolerance is, in plain language, a maximum residue level that applies only to imported food, set to accommodate the agricultural practices of exporting countries. Where a substance has been banned in the EU but trading partners continue to use it, the Commission can set an import tolerance permitting residues of that substance to enter the EU food supply at a specified level.

The system is what allows residues of EU-banned pesticides to arrive lawfully on European supermarket shelves. It is also, according to a legal analysis commissioned by the Veblen Institute, foodwatch and PAN Europe in 2026, potentially in violation of existing EU law.

The argument concerns Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 — the MRL regulation itself. It provides that, where an active substance has its EU approval revoked on health grounds, the corresponding residue limits should be deleted — the legal default being that residues of a substance Europe has banned for health reasons should be reduced to the limit of detection.

The analysis argues that the Commission's practice of maintaining or setting import tolerances for substances revoked on public health grounds — rather than automatically deleting them — does not comply with the regulation's own text. The argument is not that EU law should be changed. It is that current Commission practice does not implement the law that already exists.

This elevates the standards conversation in a specific way. The familiar form of the debate is: should the EU enact new legislation — mirror clauses, import bans, stricter residue rules — to close the gap between domestic and import standards? The legal analysis suggests a prior question. Before asking whether the rules should change, ask whether the rules already in force are being applied. The answer, on import tolerances for health-banned substances, is contested.

France, as on the export side, has moved on its own. In January 2026, France issued a ministerial order suspending the import and placing on the market of foodstuffs containing quantifiable residues of five active substances no longer authorised in the EU: the four fungicides mancozeb, thiophanate-methyl, carbendazim and benomyl, and the herbicide glufosinate. The order applies only on French territory, and only to plant products — animal products such as honey are excluded, and bananas treated with mancozeb are explicitly carved out on the grounds that no alternative fungicide exists for the tropical fungal disease that affects banana cultivation. The carve-outs are revealing in their own right. They show what kind of pressure the system folds under, and where.

Chlorpyrifos is not on the French order. No EU-level instrument covers it either. The substance Europe banned in 2020 on developmental neurotoxicity grounds, and supported listing as a global persistent organic pollutant in 2025, can still arrive lawfully in residue form on imported food in 2026, under the import-tolerance system whose legal foundation is in dispute.

What this means for European consumers — what dietary exposure to residues of substances banned on health grounds actually does, and how it is assessed — is its own question. It runs well beyond pesticides and well beyond this trade deal. It deserves a treatment of its own, and I will come back to it.

This piece is about something narrower. The policy architecture that produces the loop. A regime that bans a substance domestically on health grounds. Permits its manufacture for export, by the same domestic industry, to the producers who compete against domestic farmers. Permits residues of the same substance to return on imported food, under tolerance levels whose legal foundation is contested. And asks domestic farmers to bear the compliance cost of a domestic ban that their own industry just helped circumvent.

That is not, in any meaningful sense, a standard. It is a geography. The harm is acceptable as long as it happens elsewhere. The competition is acceptable as long as European industry profits from supplying it. The substance is acceptable as long as it arrives in residue form, on someone else's food, at a level the law was supposed to prevent.

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