The Amazon Is Burning Again — and the EU-Mercosur Deal Is About to Make It Worse

Early dry season fires are already appearing in the Amazon as the EU-Mercosur trade deal enters force. Environmental groups say the deal will accelerate what they call the 'chain saw clause.'

The satellite data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research shows fire hotspots appearing in the Amazon basin weeks earlier than the historical seasonal pattern — a pattern that climate scientists have consistently linked to the combination of higher background temperatures, reduced rainfall during what should be the wet season, and the land conversion pressure that produces both the cleared land and the fire ignition points.

The EU-Mercosur Free Trade Agreement, which enters provisional application on May 1, 2026, contains what its critics have dubbed a 'chainsaw clause' — the sustainability chapter that is supposed to constrain deforestation associated with agricultural expansion but that environmental groups argue lacks the enforcement mechanisms that would make it effective.

The Commission's position — consistently maintained through years of negotiation — is that the sustainability chapter represents the strongest environmental commitments in any EU trade agreement in history, that it includes binding forest protection obligations, and that its dispute resolution mechanism creates genuine accountability for noncompliance. Environmental organizations' position is that the binding commitments are binding in theory and unenforceable in practice, and that the agricultural expansion incentives created by improved EU market access will drive deforestation at rates that no sustainability chapter can offset.

Both positions can be simultaneously correct in the specific way that policy debates often are: the chapter is genuinely more ambitious than previous precedents while being genuinely insufficient relative to the scale of the environmental pressure the agreement creates.

The data point that environmental groups are watching most closely is the Brazilian soy expansion in the Cerrado — the tropical savanna biome south of the Amazon that has received less international attention than the Amazon itself but that is experiencing deforestation at rates that have accelerated significantly in anticipation of the EU market access improvements the Mercosur deal provides. The Cerrado does not have the iconic status of the Amazon. It has equivalent ecological importance and dramatically less protection.