Agriculture and trade, François Ruffin
Free trade agreements (Mercosur): Break with agricultural free trade: quotas and customs barriers
Direction of change: decrease, compared with current law.
The lever. Position on the European Union's trade agreements, including the agreement with Mercosur: ratification, mirror clauses, rejection. Direction rule: ↑ more agreements or openness; ↓: refusal, protections.
« Des protections à nos frontières, des quotas d’importation, des barrières douanières. C’est-à-dire, une rupture nette avec le libre-échange qui a cours, des accords de l’Uruguay round (1994) aux traités récents avec le Canada, la Nouvelle-Zélande, le Mercosur, etc. Il nous faut une exception agriculturelle, tout comme nous avons fait une exception culturelle. »1Translation by the editorsProtections at our borders, import quotas, customs barriers. That is to say, a clean break with the free trade in force, from the Uruguay Round agreements (1994) to the recent treaties with Canada, New Zealand, Mercosur, etc. We need an agricultural exception, just as we made a cultural exception.
Encoding
No cost-schedule parameter for this position: see the costing for the reason.
Costing
Announced by the candidate
not announced
The programme does not cost this measure.
Published costings
none
No external costing of this position recorded to date.
Our calculation
lever that cannot be costed
Lever with no coefficient in the cost schedule: the position is compared, not costed.
Current law, sources and limits of the cost schedule
Current law. EU-Mercosur agreement: the Council authorised its signature on 9 January 2026 by qualified majority, despite France voting against. On 21 January 2026, the European Parliament referred it to the CJEU for an opinion (334 votes for, 324 against, 11 abstentions), which suspends its consent. The Commission announced provisional application of the interim trade agreement from early May 2026; its actual entry into application has not been checked. Trade policy is an exclusive competence of the EU.
Horizon. Not applicable.
Limits. No measurable direct budgetary effect. Customs duties are an EU own resource. Sectoral effects (agriculture, industry) are a matter for impact studies, outside the static costing. A national « sortie » [“exit”] or « refus » [“refusal”] has legal force only for the part of the agreement subject to national ratification.
- Mercosur : le Parlement européen saisit la Cour de justice (Club des juristes / Aleteia, via résultat de recherche), 2026-01-22: « Recours devant la CJUE soutenu « avec 334 voix pour, 324 contre et 11 abstentions » ; la saisine suspend le processus de ratification. »
- Mercosur : la justice de l'UE rejette un recours de la Pologne (Terre-net, via résultat de recherche): « La Commission européenne avait annoncé l'application provisoire de l'accord à compter de début mai 2026. »
How to read these amounts. These are static costs and revenues, with no feedback effect, over a full year: nothing on growth, employment or the revenue that economic activity would gain or lose. A higher net cost does not on its own make a worse policy, nor net savings a better one: each programme rests on an economic model (demand-led stimulus, lower compulsory levies, consolidation of the public accounts…) that the cost schedule does not settle. GDP itself measures a volume of activity, not well-being or the usefulness of what is produced. Economic models and feedback effects.
- Cahier « Pour une exception agriculturelle française ». Read the programme page.
Contest this encoding (prefilled email; procedure and deadlines)