Importing millions of tonnes of crops and meat each year undercuts farming standards in the European Union and destroys tropical forests. The European Union’s Green Deal risks becoming a bad deal for the planet. This ambitious package of policies, announced in December 2019, aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 20501. It sets targets to reduce carbon emissions and enhance forests, farming, green transport, recycling and renewable energy. The EU wants to show “the rest of the world how to be sustainable and competitive”, as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said (see go.nature.com/2fnp1dz).

Problems lurk behind the rhetoric. First, the EU depends heavily on agricultural imports; only China imports more. Last year, the region bought in one-fifth of the crops and three-fifths of meat and dairy products consumed within its borders (118 megatonnes (Mt) and 45 Mt, respectively). This enables Europeans to farm less intensively. Yet the imports come from countries with environmental laws that are less strict than those in Europe. And EU trade agreements do not require imports to be produced sustainably.
In the past 18 months, the EU has signed deals (some pending ratification) covering nearly half of its crop imports — with the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mercosur, the South American trade bloc comprising Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Pacts with Australia and New Zealand are on the table. Each nation defines and enforces sustainability differently. Many use pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified (GM) organisms that are strictly limited or forbidden in the EU (see Supplementary information, table S2a).
The net result? EU member states are outsourcing environmental damage to other countries, while taking the credit for green policies at home. Although the EU acknowledges that some new legislation will be required around trade, in the short term, nothing will change under the Green Deal.

For example, between 1990 and 2014, European forests expanded by 9%, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Greece (13 million hectares; Mha) (see ‘Trade-offs’; www.fao.org/faostat/en). Elsewhere, around 11 Mha was deforested to grow crops that were consumed within the EU (see Supplementary information). Three-quarters of this deforestation was linked to oilseed production in Brazil and Indonesia — regions of unparalleled biodiversity and home to some of the world’s largest carbon sinks, crucial for mitigating climate change.
Such impacts must be avoided if the Green Deal is to enhance global sustainability. Here, we outline how.

Loose guidance
The Green Deal will transform European agriculture over the next decade. A ‘farm to fork’ initiative aims to reduce fertilizer use in Europe by 20% and pesticides by 50%, with one-quarter of land to be farmed organically by 2030. The EU plans to plant 3 billion trees, restore 25,000 kilometres of rivers and reverse the decline of pollinators.
No parallel targets have been set for external trade (see go.nature.com/3703bip). A patchwork of rules, some mandatory and some voluntary, will continue to govern the sustainability of agricultural imports to the EU. All must abide by an overarching policy, the 2018 Revised Renewable Energy Directive. It stipulates, for example, that oilseeds such as soya beans should not be sourced from recently deforested land (see go.nature.com/33vqz86). Such requirements are patchy and poorly enforced. REad the fulltext article using the link above