Your Made in Europe Chocolate Bar is Part of the Distorted Trade Rules – and Here Is Why.

Fair Trade Rules an Imperative to Counter Global North Double Standards

European double standards on food production and safety are a sustainability trap for Global South farmers— lax rules for imports but stringent ones at home – locked in unfair trade.

While Europe is an important market for African produce, it places huge standards requirements that frustrate instead of facilitating trade. Global has never been a level playing field, with the Global North using quality standards as punitive trade barriers for the Global South.

With climate change, the disparities are greater. Farmers in Africa are battling droughts, floods, and soil degradation struggle to meet Europe’s rigid export criteria, even as their crops—like coffee and cocoa— are getting harder to grow.

Without urgent support, Europe may soon find its chocolate and coffee either prohibitively costly or absent from shelves altogether. Already, climate change is affecting the key source crops – cocoa, coffee, banana – from the global South where countries are vulnerable to droughts, floods and high temperatures.

Industrial farming, with its promises of boosting productivity and income, has come at a price for smallholder farmers because of unsustainable production costs. Many farmers use improved seeds and fertilizers they have to purchase each farming season.

Besides high tariffs have constrained value addition in Global South agriculture, meaning farmers in Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria and Ecuador are largely exporting raw materials – cocoa beans instead of chocolate – and realising less value from their produce.

The European Union imposes tariffs on processed chocolate but 0% on raw cocoa, ensuring Africa, which provides 70% of global cocoa remains a key supplier rather than a competitor yet chocolate makers in Europe can export high-value finished products. The EU exempts its own food imports from the strict safety and environmental standards it imposes on domestic producers—a hypocrisy that undermines fair trade.

Global South farmers practicing agroecology and conservation agriculture have proved that sustainable farming methods can boost climate resilience. Yet their efforts are off tracked by tough trade rules favouring industrial monoculture. The result? Banned chemicals destroy biodiversity, pollute river systems and affect human health while promising to improve agriculture productivity for many farmers who can ill afford them.

Mirror Clauses to Straighten Trade Rules

The current global trade system favours the powerful. The TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) has been criticised for favouring the Global North over the Global South on global standards in intellectual property, for instance, access to patented technologies such as seeds and other resources for food production in the global south.

The 1996 World Food Summit, in committing to food, agriculture trade and other trade policies, underscored the need to ensure “that food, agricultural trade and overall trade policies are conducive to fostering food security for all through a fair and market-oriented world trade system.” A lofty undertaking but a difficult one to fulfill owing to deeply entrenched uneven global market rules. Multilateralism is urgently needed in the food trade.

The globalization of food has been lopsided seen as the  Global South has become a dumping market for subsidized imports from the Global North. Chicken, wheat, maize, soy bean and meat have been dumped in African countries like South Africa and Nigeria, undercutting the viability of local farmers and contributing to food import dependency.

The Global North spends over $800 billion annually on farm subsidies. The FAO projects this will be $1.8 trillion by 2030. Such subsidies distort prices and undercut unsubsidized produce from Africa.

While stringent and punitive phytosanitary close the door to most agriculture produce from Africa. For instance, Europe has blocked African groundnut exports over aflatoxin risks while ignoring similar hazards in its own imports.

The ban of harmful pesticides in the EU does not  apply to crops imported from Africa —where the same chemicals degrade ecosystems and pose a health hazard. From atrazine, carbendazim, dichlorvos to paraquat, and neonicotinoid insecticides, Europe still exports harmful pesticides banned at home to Africa.

The EU in 2018 shipped over 80,000 tons of banned pesticides to Africa, Asia and Latin America where there is less stringent regulation over their use and handling.

Africa food exports should be subjected to the same food safety and environmental standards as those produced in Europe. It is fair and just but also protects the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. For Africa to compete internationally, it needs to fight systematic trade inequalities and demand mirror clauses in all agreements. If Europe bans a pesticide, it shouldn’t import crops grown with it.

The recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is an opportunity to boost intra-African trade, especially agri-food trade.

As the Slow Food movement has argued, farmers and consumers alike have a right to fair food and transparency in the food imported into the EU from the Global South where it is produced. has produced, calling for an end to double standards in food imports into the European Union: farmers and consumers have the right to fairness and transparency.

In a 2024 report, Double standards on our plates – Slow Food calls for an end to double standards applied to imported food and to use so-called mirror clauses to ensure that non-European food complies with the standards established for the same food produced in the European Union.

“Currently, European citizens have no certainty about how food imported into the EU from third countries is produced. For example, genetically modified soya, meat from animals raised with antibiotics as growth promoters, and fruit and vegetables treated with highly dangerous substances and pesticides not approved by the EU end up on our plates,” Slow Food has said, arguing that an analysis of some foods shows the negative effects on the health of people, animals and ecosystems in producing countries – especially in the Global South – and the unfair competition to the detriment of European farmers.

Trade Justice Is a Must

The current trade system deepens inequality and unfairness reminiscent of past colonial trade.   The global south should demand reciprocal trade rules to ensure the same standards applied to their exports are mirrored in imports from the global North. Only then can trade become an engine of shared prosperity, not perpetual dependency.