The EU's trade policy is primarily aimed at improving the competitiveness and profit prospects of European companies. The EU demands that other countries grant it unrestricted market access for its goods, services and investments, unhindered access to public contracts and raw materials as well as greater protection for investments and intellectual property.

This applies to World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements and - to an even greater extent - to bilateral trade agreements between the EU and countries such as Peru, Colombia, Central America and South Korea. The EU is also seeking similar agreements with the MERCOSUR countries Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. It has already negotiated so-called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with some African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, which are now due to be ratified.

However, such trade policies deepen the colonial division of labour, in which countries of the Global South predominantly export raw materials the industrial processing of which mainly takes place in countries of the Global North. These countries, in turn, mainly produce and export finished products and offer services, which secures them the majority of global value creation and jobs.

In addition, these agreements are forcing the opening up of agricultural markets, particularly in African countries, thus undermining their food sovereignty. European milk powder in Burkina Faso and Nigeria, pork in Côte d'Ivoire or even tomato paste or poultry parts in Ghana - the pattern is always the same: when cheap, often subsidised EU products flood a country, prices fall. Local farming families are unable to compete with their products, become impoverished or are forced out of the market altogether.

EU trade policy jeopardises the right to food and other social rights: when overly strict intellectual property rights in Colombia and Peru prevent AIDS and cancer patients from receiving affordable medication; when rigid patent protection means that small farmers suddenly have to buy their seeds; or when the planned EU-Mercosur agreement contributes to the further expansion of mining, soya fields, sugar cane plantations and livestock farming and thus to the destruction of rainforests and the displacement of Indigenous and farming communities.

This is all the more true as the sustainability chapters in existing or planned EU trade agreements are not subject to the sanction-based dispute settlement mechanism, meaning that violations have no consequences. Together with Greenpeace, we have published a legal opinion in which these weaknesses are analysed and concrete proposals for effective sustainability chapters and human rights clauses are formulated. In another legal opinion, Misereor, together with CIDSE, proposes rules that could enshrine the primacy of human rights over trade and investment interests under international law in the planned UN agreement on business and human rights.

It is crucial that trade agreements leave the countries of the Global South sufficient room for manoeuvre to develop their own economies, generate added value for their own populations, implement social human rights and protect the climate and the environment.