Environmental Protection in the International Agenda: Opportunity or Threat to Agricultural Trade?

Environmental protection and international business do not seem to get along and appear to have a negative causal-relationship. If more measures are applied to protect the environment, businesses’ costs increase and lose competitiveness. Thus, the increasing urgency and pressure to protect the environment has been changing the way business is done, not only because non-tariff measures keep multiplying, but also because exporters need to comply with them by modifying their production process, technology, quality of products and productivity, which increases their costs and threatens their business plans. In particular, the agricultural industry in developing countries are the most affected by these new environmental-related requirements. Hence, we propose in this paper to study the application of these measures by the European Union in the market of tea, coffee and yerba mate in Latin America, and analyze the role of cooperation at different levels (national, regional and international) in international business and environmental protection. In our findings, we highlight that although these measures can affect firms negatively in the short-term, when companies comply with them can experience a positive growth in their productive quality in the medium-long term. In this context, cooperatives, organizations and governments play an essential role to help firms, specially SMEs to exceed their costs.