Following the debate on the Mercosur trade agreement in recent weeks was like going back and forth from an alien planet.

Not only the hubbub on social media, but also the speeches of politicians, including the presidents of nations like Italy, France and Poland, were all about agriculture.

Gleaming 100,000 euro tractors blocked the streets of the capital cities, while frantic negotiations promised to limit to 10%, then 8%, then 5% the amount of sugar or rice that could arrive on our shelves from South America.
The fears of ‘contaminated meat’, ‘ meat with GMOs’ and ‘meat with antibiotics’, which had already darkened the debate on CETA (the trade agreement with Canada) years ago, came back.

And, just as in the case of the Arctic country, the essentials were lost sight of.

The buried treasure

Canada is the world’s fourth largest producer of oil and the second largest producer of uranium for nuclear power plants.
In addition to these two energy resources, it supplies European companies with steel, nickel, plastics, potash for fertilisers, timber, precious stones, and only to a small extent, the much feared meat (which obviously turned out to meet our EU standards scrupulously). It is easy to see how this has helped to free us from dependence on Russia from 2022.
Despite this rich basket of goods, however, Ottawa still has an unbalanced trade balance in favour of Brussels.

Now, if we move from the northern forests to the equatorial ones, the matter changes little.
The four states included in Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), to which Bolivia will be added in two years’ time, cover most of the surface area of the South American continent: a vast territory that abounds in raw materials, needs investment to develop and has a growing demand for sophisticated goods and services that it cannot yet produce itself.

On our side of the Atlantic, unfortunately, we still tend to imagine a South America made up only of maracas and favelas, Amazonian tribes and beggar populism.
But the truth is that the peoples of Mercosur (especially the younger generations) would like to shake off this whining narrative at all costs: they want to stop feeling ‘third world’, and the recent cascade of electoral victories of the pro-business right, with all its flaws, had the merit of showing us this.

So far, it has been China that has satisfied this demand for their development, imposing itself as their first economic partner.
But mutual distrust remains. Tariffs between the two shores of the Pacific keep coming and going (recently Beijing hit Brazilian beef with a 55% tariff), so that for us Europeans a unique window of opportunity is opening up: to enter that market by guaranteeing, unlike the Chinese, clear rules and no surprise tariffs.

What would we gain?

Lifeblood for manufacturing

Let us abandon for a moment the magical alien world in which Mercosur is an agreement on agriculture and the advantage for countries like Italy are only the overseas protection of DOC certifications.

In the real world, Europe has a seriously ailing industrial sector that, according to estimates, would find immediate relief in South American markets: +14 billion in exports only for Italy (28 times more than the agricultural sector and as much as the entire GDP increase in 2025). Export will concern mainly advanced machinery, cars and medicines.

However, as in the case of Canada, the real advantage in the long run is access to an almost unlimited pool of raw materials.
Already today, in fact, the bulk of Europe’s purchases from the Mercosur area consists of oil, iron ore and pulp (not Angus steaks, whatever you may think).

But the margins for growth are still considerable.

Brazil and Argentina, in fact, have reserves of most of the minerals needed by European industries: just think that, in order to assemble a car, one needs hundreds of kg of iron, carbon, aluminium, zinc for rustproof paint and, for internal electronic devices, graphite, copper, magnesium, lithium, cobalt and nickel.

The automotive industry may seem like a bygone era, but if we move on to a cutting-edge sector such as robotics, we find a need for the same materials, alongside other lesser-known ones such as titanium, phosphorus, niobium, germanium and boron.

Chinese dominance

Needless to say, at the moment the exclusive supplier of almost all these materials to our companies is China. A dependence that is becoming more and more crippling year after year.

It is no coincidence that in December 2025 the European Union launched a strategy called ReSource Eu, which aims to halve our exposure to a single supplier in four years for the thirteen ‘rare earths’ and other minerals indispensable to the space and defence industry.

To achieve this goal, alongside with the agreement with Mercosur and those within the G7, the old continent can rely on two other fundamental partnerships: the one with Mexico (which is no longer a land of peons with sombreros but a global chemical and electronics giant as well as a net exporter of oil) and the one with Indonesia (which among its 17,000 islands has deposits of nickel, copper, rubber and bauxite as well as being the world’s sixth largest exporter of liquefied natural gas).

By patiently weaving its web, in short, Europe has created free trade zones with over 800 million other inhabitants of the planet, who live in democratic, peaceful, reliable and resource-rich countries.

By moving between nodes of this web, European companies should soon be able to obtain the raw materials they need without having to submit to the bullying of China, Russia or other paranoid dictatorships.

And even when, for market convenience, they turn to authoritarian regimes (such as Algeria for gas or Kazakhstan for uranium), they will know that they can always count on a plan B should they be forced to sever relations for political reasons.

Why not do everything at home?

Of course, one question arises: why do we Europeans continue to outsource the extraction of raw materials, transferring it to other continents and bearing both the risks and the uncomfortable accusations of neo-colonialism?

The fact is that many of those raw materials cannot be found in Europe, or if they can be found, they are difficult to extract.

First, because we lack the know-how: among the top 50 mining companies in the world, not one is registered in a European country.

Then because geography poses its own challenges.
There is much talk about Greenland, but opening mines on an island with sub-zero temperatures and no major transport infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive.
Ukraine, another promising mining basin, has been under Russian military attack for 12 years. The people of Serbia have made it a condition for approaching the EU that the controversial Jadar mine not be excavated.
Perhaps the Germans might manage to open a lithium cave in the Altmark three years from now, but that would be more unique than rare.

Generally speaking, Europe is much more densely populated than Canada, Mexico, South America or many Indonesian islands, which makes the impact of opening a mine more dramatic, causing a backlash of discontent and political confrontation that lengthens the time, increases costs and decreases profit margins.

Finally, there is the problem of where to process the minerals after extracting them.

At the moment, for a change, the only possible answer is ‘in China’. And to delude oneself that the entire industry can be shifted to Europe is pathetic (despite the public subsidies that the ReSource EU plan envisages).
Only by spreading non-Chinese-owned processing plants to different areas of the globe can Beijing’s overwhelming power be challenged.

Time is running out

But the main problem is that we do not have time.
Alternative suppliers to China or other authoritarian regimes we need now.
Military exercises around Taiwan have already been held several times. Trump threatens shenanigans over Greenland. The world has never been so unstable in four generations.

Old Europe has woven its protective net and now it must begin to exploit it. Going back to piercing its own subsoil will be discussed more calmly. For that, yes, would be an epochal reversal of mentality.