When we order a meat dish at a restaurant, we rarely ask ourselves where it comes from. Which country? What kind of farm? These are questions that, when eating out, almost always go unanswered.
While we may check labels at the supermarket, at restaurants, canteens, and all the places where we eat outside our own homes, we have no idea where the products being served come from.
Yet it is a question we should ask ourselves with the same care we apply when reading supermarket labels. With the opening up to foreign markets — Mercosur chief among them — our tables are increasingly supplied with products from farms that would be illegal in Europe.
The Union has built, over the years, some of the world’s most advanced rules on animal welfare. But they only apply to European producers.
A paradox that is hard to understand.
The EU has a history of advanced protective regulations
The EU has repeatedly used its pioneering regulations as a tool of global influence. What scholars call the “Brussels Effect” — that is, Brussels’ ability to impose its regulatory standards on the rest of the world, since anyone wishing to export to Europe has no choice but to comply with them.
It happened with data privacy, with restrictions on pesticides, with safety regulations, including food safety for products. It is happening, laboriously, on the environmental front as well. But there is one area where this logic has stalled in a rather obvious way — probably because it is not considered particularly important — and that is the welfare of farmed animals.
Double standards
The EU has built, over the years, a body of legislation for the protection of animals in farming, during transport and at slaughter that, despite its considerable limitations, is among the most advanced in the world.
Battery cages banned for laying hens, minimum space guaranteed for pigs, restrictions on mutilations, rules on transport and slaughter. These are regulations that impose real costs on European producers and that, despite some of them being quite dated, reflect a widespread sensitivity among consumers for whom animal welfare protection must be a priority for both EU products and imported ones.
The issue of imports in this area suffers, however, from a structural anomaly: while it is true that these rules apply to those who produce in Europe, it is equally true that they do not apply to those who export animal products to Europe.
For example, a Brazilian producer exporting chicken breasts to the European market is not required to comply with the same stocking density conditions as a Polish or German producer. A Ukrainian exporter of egg products can use battery cages that have been banned in the EU for over a decade and have their products end up in the kitchens of European restaurants, with no obligation of transparency towards the end consumer.
This asymmetry is not a minor detail: it is a fundamental political contradiction, one that is also hampering the very revision of European animal welfare regulations.
The Brussels Effect and its limits
To understand why this asymmetry is geopolitically significant yet solvable, we need to return to the Brussels Effect.
When Europe sets a rule, multinationals wishing to enter the single market comply, and often apply the same standard elsewhere too, because managing parallel supply chains is too costly.
The same mechanism could work for animal welfare, but only if Europe truly decides to use its commercial attractiveness as leverage. Today, it does not.
As documented by Eurogroup for Animals in the report Stop Cruel Imports, major global producers such as JBS in Brazil and MHP in Ukraine, or the Thai poultry giants, comply with European health standards because they have no choice, but are free not to comply with animal welfare standards.
The revision of European legislation on animal welfare, announced by the Commission some years ago, represents a concrete opportunity to close this gap. Extending welfare requirements to imported products would not mean erecting protectionist barriers disguised as ethical norms, but rather consistently applying an already existing principle.
WTO rules allow for this, provided the requirements are non-discriminatory and serve recognised public morality objectives. This is exactly the case: all surveys show that European citizens are calling for higher levels of protection for farmed animals.
A setback for non-EU producers?
The main exporting countries of animal products to the EU are not poor and vulnerable nations but countries with robust economies such as the United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina, Norway, and the United States, with large multinationals accustomed to operating in sophisticated and diverse regulatory environments.
Let us look, country by country, at what would really change.
The United Kingdom, which is the EU’s leading supplier across many categories of animal products — from pork to eggs, from beef to dairy products — has animal welfare standards substantially equivalent to European ones. An extension of import requirements would therefore have minimal impact in terms of adjustment and could, in fact, encourage further harmonisation post-Brexit, in the interest of both parties.
Brazil is the most delicate case. It is the second largest supplier of beef and the largest of poultry to the EU, with companies such as JBS and BRF dominating exports. Both have adopted voluntary animal welfare commitments in their institutional communications. Translating these commitments into concrete obligations tied to access to the European market would not be a major issue for these companies — indeed, it could simplify a landscape in which they currently have to respond to a myriad of private requirements imposed by individual European distributors, often more stringent and less predictable than uniform legislation.
Then there is the chapter on Ukraine, which in recent years — following the trade liberalisation introduced as a support measure after the Russian invasion — has become a growing supplier of poultry and egg products to the EU.
Ukraine is a candidate country for EU accession, and the European perspective already requires a path of regulatory alignment. Applying the same standards to Ukrainian exporters as those required of EU producers would, in this sense, be consistent with the very logic of the accession process.
Furthermore, applying animal welfare standards to imports would not mean excluding developing countries from the European market; indeed, these countries already export little to the EU because they are unable to meet the far more stringent sanitary and phytosanitary requirements that already exist.
Therefore, the measure would only affect large industrial exporters, who have the resources to adapt.
Nor would it mean significantly raising consumer prices, since imports of animal products represent a relatively small share of total European consumption, and producers exporting to the EU are often already oriented towards premium market segments.
In the long term, this could therefore trigger exactly the Brussels Effect that has worked in other areas, pushing major global players to raise their own standards.
Europe, as mentioned earlier, has already demonstrated its ability to use this lever. The question is whether it has the political will to do so for animal welfare too — to bridge the asymmetry between European producers and those from other markets — or whether other interests will instead prevail.
The revision of European animal welfare regulations is called for by 80% of European citizens. It is time for Brussels to decide whether it truly wants to live up to the model it has built, or whether its rules will continue to stop at the border.