By Cláudia Ascensão Nunes

In Brussels, we have witnessed a scene that has become increasingly common: protests by European farmers marked by escalating hostility, including burning tires and clashes with police. This discontent is the cumulative reaction to a process that has dragged on for more than 25 years, and is now being pushed toward completion under conditions that are deeply damaging to European farmers.

Some invoke the benefits of free markets, and, under normal circumstances, these do indeed offer the best outcomes for both producers and consumers. The problem is that between European farmers and producers from Mercosur—a trade bloc that includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—the market can never be truly free, because farmers in each bloc operate under fundamentally different regulatory conditions.

The European Union (EU) requires its farmers to comply with increasingly stringent environmental, sanitary, and labor standards under the European Green Deal and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)—including specific rules such as GAEC 8, which obliges farmers to leave portions of their land uncultivated as fallow areas or nonproductive features like hedgerows or biodiversity zones. These requirements significantly raise production costs. At the same time, the EU seeks to open its market to products from countries that are not subject to comparable rules and can sell at lower prices. Under these conditions, to speak of a “free market” is a conceptual error. There is no market freedom when costs are imposed asymmetrically by........

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