The EU-Mercosur trade deal signed in December 2024 is driving a severe crisis in Western European agriculture, with farmers protesting against a flood of cheaper, less-regulated imports from South America. This agreement, seen by some as a "day of reckoning," threatens to ruin Western European farms, forcing many to face unsustainable profits and consider leaving crops to rot.
Key details regarding the crisis:
The Mercosur Deal Conflict: The agreement connects the EU with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Uruguay, allowing for increased imports of commodities like beef. Farmers in France, Ireland, Poland, and Austria oppose this, arguing it compromises their livelihood and food safety standards.
Impact on Farmers: European farmers claim that the competition from South America, coupled with strict local environmental regulations, makes their businesses unviable.
Production Concerns: There is widespread fear that South American imports are produced using chemicals banned in the EU.
Uncertain Future: Despite opposition, the deal is supported by major economies like Germany, though it faces ongoing, intense protests.
The situation highlights a widening gap between EU policy and the agricultural sector, leading to protests that have paralyzed parts of cities like Paris.
Farmers in the U.S. are facing similar problems:
“Jack Westerfield stood ankle deep atop 30 feet of unhusked rice, his gray T-shirt and jeans dusty with starchy powder. He sounded distressed.
“What am I supposed to do with 2.2 million pounds of rice?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the noisy industrial fans drying the rice on his farm in Merigold, Miss. “I’m serious. What am I supposed to do?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Mr. Westerfield had even considered whether he should dump the grains onto a field to rot.
Across the country, farmers are struggling. Prices for nearly every major crop are below what it costs to grow them.
Much attention has been paid to Midwestern soybean growers, whose crop was at the heart of the trade war between the United States and China.
But farmers in Mississippi are perhaps worse off than farmers in the rest of the country. Rice is one of their biggest crops, and almost no one is buying.
Things feel so hopeless that at a recent Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, a group representing farmers, participants floated the idea of a government program that would pay producers to destroy the harvested rice sitting in their bins. A similar program was put in place during the 1980s farm crisis, when the Agriculture Department paid farmers to idle land and reduce huge surpluses of crops.
“We are making a lot of good crops, and losing money,” said Gwin Smith, the longtime owner of Rutledge Investment Company, a Mississippi agricultural land broker.
The Mississippi Delta is a 200-mile-long pocket of fertile soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. But farming costs are high. Most crops must be planted in a short window between spring rains and summer heat, and it is always a race in the fall to harvest and prepare fields before winter rains render them muddy and unworkable. This forces up labor costs during those periods.
And unlike Midwest summers, when rains provide most of the water for crops, drier Mississippi summers mean crops must be irrigated, requiring equipment and expensive fuel to power pumping.
Mississippi’s biggest advantage, besides good soil, is the diversity of things that can be grown. While most of the Midwest grows only corn, soybeans and wheat, Mississippi farmers can grow those crops as well as cotton and rice. Whenever one crop is selling at a premium, farmers will shift to growing more of it.
That’s why Mr. Westerfield thought he was being pragmatic last spring, when he looked at $7-a-bushel rice and planted 1,000 acres more than planned on the 11,000 acres he farms with his brother-in-law and a friend.
Mr. Westerfield’s bet on rice proved ill timed. Rice prices took a dive, with futures declining about 30 percent in the last year. India, the world’s largest producer of rice, eased export restrictions in late 2024, flooding the world with rice. Customers in Latin America, where most U.S. rice is exported, increasingly prefer the taste of varieties grown in other countries.
The value of Mississippi’s row crops, including rice, fell 9 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to the Mississippi State University Extension Service, and farm bankruptcies, though still low, are on the rise.
Unable to get any bid on his rice this fall, Mr. Westerfield had to store it in his grain bins. That meant that he had no room for the soybeans and corn he also grew and had to send them straight from the field to the local grain elevator. When soybean prices rose by $1 per bushel in November, on expectations of China’s re-entering the soybean market, he was unable to take advantage. He had already sold all of his crop.
Climbing a Mountain of Debt
Mr. Westerfield didn’t grow up on a farm. His father was a lawyer and his mother ran a boutique store. He went to college, but dropped out. He ran a restaurant and worked on some farms before deciding to do it full time.
“Growing up, all it is here in the Delta is flat as a pancake, nothing but agriculture,” he said. “I thought it was the cool thing to do.”
Most farmers identify themselves by what generation farmer they are. It is a shorthand for their connection to the land. It can also indicate an economic leg up.
Sixth-generation farmers may well have inherited the land they work and a lot of the equipment they use.
Mr. Westerfield is a first-generation farmer. He started working on another farm full time to learn the ropes, flipping houses and selling stuff on eBay on the side. He was able to afford to buy his first 80 acres because his father helped with the down payment. He buys whatever old machinery he can find and learns to fix it to save costs.
As the average age of farmers inches up, and expensive land and equipment make it cost prohibitive for newcomers to enter the profession, stories like Mr. Westerfield’s are uncommon. And they will remain that way, especially if losing hundreds of thousands of dollars this year on rice pushes him too far into the red.
All of it makes Mr. Westerfield, a relatively young farmer at 37, wonder about the future. “Who wants to come out here and work as hard as you have to work and climb this mountain of debt you might not see the top of until the end of your life?” he asked.
The Mississippi Delta has a history as an agriculture powerhouse, though its wealth rarely flowed to those who worked the fields or the surrounding areas. At the time of the Civil War, the Delta was dominated by cotton plantations, and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow casts a long shadow.
Many farms rely on white South Africans on H-2A visas, and some have settled lawsuits accusing them of paying those laborers more than Black farmworkers.
One of Mr. Westerfield’s farms is adjacent to a dilapidated wooden barn indistinguishable from the thousands of others dotting the area. But this is the barn where 14-year-old Emmet Till was lynched in 1955. Mr. Westerfield is in discussions with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center to sell some land to make access to the site easier.
Most Delta towns have been losing population for decades. Outside of a few sizable towns, farmland and cypress trees stretch as far as the eye can see, and little tufts of cotton that float off the back of trucks are stuck everywhere.
“We have a lot of old farmers in the world, and a good set of young farmers, but they haven’t done well enough to build equity or buy land,” said Mr. Smith, the land broker. “Made some good money, but they don’t have the working capital or the land equity maybe to survive this thing.”
Hard-Hit Crops
Wayne Dulaney, 52, probably does have enough working capital and land equity to survive. But he is questioning whether trying to survive is worth it, and whether it is something he wants to pass on to his children.
The Dulaneys have been farming in Clarksdale, in the northern Mississippi Delta, so long that some of their property abuts Dulaney Road, named for the family. His father also started a seed selling business in the 1990s, and even after it was sold, Mr. Dulaney has continued as a part-time salesman for other seed companies.
He farms about 4,000 acres of mostly rice and soybeans alongside his brother, working out of the old seed company offices.
Mr. Dulaney has more than 200,000 bushels of rice, or around 9 million pounds, sitting in his bins, and had losses of around $600,000 in 2025. It is disconcerting even for somebody comfortable with agriculture’s boom-and-bust cycles.
“There have been plenty of years in there where we have had a $100,000 to $300,000 loss in a year,” he said. Usually, you make that up in the next year or two. “But we are basically on Year 4 of things being tight,” he said.
The land he works is owned by a family trust, in which he has a share. His red line is clear: He won’t put up his share as collateral for a loan to cover his losses.
“I’m not going to do that,” he said emphatically. “I’m not going to risk the land.”
Mr. Dulaney, Mr. Westerfield and other Delta farmers will benefit from the $12 billion in bailout money announced by the Trump administration. Payment rates for growers of rice and cotton are the highest under the program, an acknowledgment of how badly the crops grown in Mississippi have been hit.
But nobody thinks the bailout money will fundamentally change the hole farmers are in. Receiving $132 per acre of rice — the price the government has set for rice — matters little when you paid $1,000 per acre to grow it.
“All I am hearing everywhere about the $12b payment is the plan is way too low considering,” Mr. Smith emailed before Christmas. He added, “There are a lot of people getting out or thinking about it.”
Grow What You Eat?
To the World Wildlife Fund, the solution to these structural barriers to profitability is obvious, if difficult to carry out: Grow food that Americans eat.
Most of what is farmed in Mississippi and the rest of the country isn’t food that goes on Americans’ tables. It is soybeans grown for animal feed, corn grown for ethanol, rice grown to export to Central America and so on. The fruits and vegetables that Mississippians eat are probably grown in California or in other countries.
The wildlife fund calculates that if just 3 percent of Mississippi Delta agricultural land was converted from traditional row crops into fruits, vegetables and nuts, producers would earn an additional $3.2 billion in revenue because those crops receive higher prices. Mississippi’s total agricultural production was valued at $9.5 billion in 2025, though that includes livestock and forestry.
But the challenges of growing those crops are enormous. Local universities don’t do research on them. The federal government doesn’t insure them. There is little processing infrastructure. The banks are leery about lending. And farmers have to find their own buyers.
It is too much risk for Wayne Dulaney. “We could grow strawberries or whatever,” he said, “but there is nowhere to take it.”
For now, Mississippi farmers like Mr. Dulaney are looking toward 2027 and 2028, hoping things will change. Planting won’t begin for a few months, but they have already written off 2026.” [1]
1. Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot. Draper, Kevin. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jan 25, 2026.
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