The recent Mercosur–EU trade agreement has been presented to European consumers as a victory for free trade, lower prices, and economic efficiency. What has been discussed far less is the cost of this efficiency: the steady erosion of the European consumer’s ability to understand, influence, and ultimately control what enters their food system. As supply chains lengthen and raw materials are outsourced, the entire industry becomes more fragile.
In this context, palm oil is a great example of the resulting issues of overly liberal commercial policies. It is the clearest illustration of how trade agreements that prioritise volume and price over traceability quietly transfer decision-making away from consumers.
The problem of palm oil is, first of all, an ecological one.
In order to plant palm trees, vast areas of tropical forest are cut down. Many of these forests are the natural habitat of orangutans, now on the brink of extinction.
When the land is prepared, businessmen and farmers arrive and set the forests on fire. Everything burns: animals, orangutans, sometimes people. It does not matter. What matters is that money comes out of it.
That is why many people ask for palm oil to be produced “ethically”. But, as usual, we have reached a point where many of these certificates are counterfeit or simply untrue.
Moreover, quality systems that are excessively bureaucratic and complex are, paradoxically, easier to cheat.
Another problem concerns the information given to the consumer.
In poorer countries, palm oil is increasingly used to replace dairy fat. Very often one does not even know that they are eating palm oil. And this is not correct. This is not a matter of taste or preference; it is a form of product falsification. Furthermore, if an ingredient is not declared, nobody bothers anymore about its quality.
I believe that this massive shift toward cheaper ingredients such as palm oil is extremely dangerous, especially for developing countries such as Moldova (or in fact most of Eastern Europe). Slowly but surely, producers become dependent on a raw material over which they have no control.
A simple disruption of global supply chains, such as during the COVID pandemic, and the country “catches fire” because an entire category of products suddenly becomes dramatically more expensive. The country does not merely face inflation; it loses resilience.
Then the farmers (in this case, milk producers) lose their accumulated experience and are forced to rebuild an industry from zero.
Rebuilding such industries is neither quick nor trivial. Farmers forced out of production lose more than income. They lose skills, continuity, and intergenerational knowledge. What appears as a rational cost-saving measure in trade statistics reveals itself, under stress, as strategic vulnerability.
This dynamic is not unique to food. It mirrors the logic of remote warfare and digital communication: when actions are separated from their consequences by distance, abstraction, and intermediaries, responsibility dissolves. Systems designed to optimise efficiency end up optimising irresponsibility. The further production is pushed out of sight, the easier it becomes to deny its costs.