There is a choreography repeating itself in Brussels for months now that almost no one observes as a whole. While the European press spends weeks debating the fate of irregular migrants and the new return centres outside the Union, the same group of MEPs driving that discussion votes, almost in silence, on a series of laws that reduce the obligation of large European corporations to answer for what happens inside their supply chains. The result is not a calendar coincidence. It is a redistribution of weight. The oversight loosened in Brussels for multinationals shifts, without anyone announcing it, onto the Colombian coffee grower who must now hand over satellite coordinates of his plot to keep selling his harvest in Europe. The mechanism is simple, as well designed mechanisms for moving cost from one end of a chain to the other almost always are.
The spectacle of returns
In March 2026, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties committee approved a hardened version of the so called return regulation, which allows the creation of migrant detention centres outside Union territory, the now famous return hubs, and extends to twenty four months the possible detention of those who refuse to leave the continent. The committee vote alone passed by 41 votes to 32 with one abstention, confirming a trend in which the European People’s Party increasingly sides with the right wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the far right Patriots for Europe and Europe of Sovereign Nations, breaking what had until then been the chamber’s traditional centrist majority. The final text was ratified months later in plenary by 418 votes in favour, 218 against and 30 abstentions, with the backing of the same three families. For the first time in the Parliament’s recent history, that alliance broke the cordon sanitaire that for decades had kept the far right out of legislative majorities.
MEP François Xavier Bellamy, architect of the compromise that replaced the original, more moderate text and hardened the initial proposal further, called the result a historic step. What was voted that night replaced, under conditions one French outlet described as a parliamentary coup, the text drafted by liberal rapporteur Malik Azmani with a last minute compromise put forward by the conservative right itself.
On the other side of the chamber, Green MEP Marie Toussaint spoke of an unprecedented alliance to dismantle the foundations of the European democratic project. Socialist MEP Cecilia Strada was more precise still, warning that whenever right wing groups join forces, it is always to play with the rights of the most vulnerable. Italian Conservatives and Reformists MEP Alessandro Ciriani replied that Europe was finally adopting a more realistic approach, freed from what he called the paralysis of ideological polarisation.
The debate filled weeks of headlines, with protests, opinion columns and statements from heads of state about the firmness required against irregular migration. That is precisely what it needed in order to function. No mechanism of power survives without a stage on which to perform, and migration has offered, for years now, the perfect stage, charged with emotion, easy to compress into a single image, capable of filling an entire newscast without ever requiring a single budget figure to be explained.
The European Parliament approved the return regulation by 418 votes in favour, 218 against and 30 abstentions, on the basis of an unprecedented alliance between the European People’s Party, the Conservatives and Reformists, and the far right groups.
The regulation nobody watches
Almost in parallel with that sequence, the same centre right and far right coalition approved eleven legislative packages called Omnibus, officially presented as administrative simplification meant to ease the bureaucratic burden on European companies. Since February 2025, the European Commission has rolled them out one after another, covering agriculture, industry, chemicals and the environment, in some cases amending texts the Parliament itself had approved barely a year earlier. European law professor Merijn Chamon explains that an omnibus package allows several directives to be reopened at once within a single bill, rather than debating each separately, which considerably accelerates the process, normally two to four years of negotiation compressed into a few months.
The first of these, voted in November 2025, drastically reduced the scope of two directives presented barely a year before as a historic step forward, the corporate sustainability reporting directive and the corporate sustainability due diligence directive, known by its acronym CSDDD. The latter obliges, in theory, large European companies to identify and prevent the harm their own activities and those of their suppliers cause to human rights and the environment throughout their entire supply chain. Conservatives and Reformists group president Nicola Procaccini described the vote as the first time in the Parliament’s history that a piece of legislation, rather than a merely symbolic vote, had been adopted by this new centre right majority.
The Omnibus package raised the threshold for companies covered, from one thousand to five thousand employees and from 450 million to 1.5 billion euros in turnover for the first phase of application, scheduled for 2027. It also eliminated the very notion of a risk sector, which had required closer scrutiny of textile, mining or agribusiness activities, placing every sector under the same generic threshold, with no distinction for those where the risk of human rights violations is structurally higher.
The most decisive change for any producer outside Europe was a different one. The duty of vigilance was limited to a company’s direct suppliers, which in practice excludes the chain’s most distant links, exactly where the risks of labour exploitation, deforestation or land dispossession concentrate. The organisation Fairtrade warned that this limitation ignores how supply chains actually function, where the greatest risks are not found at the first level but further back, near the original producer. The Council of the European Union also removed the obligation to consult affected parties before terminating a commercial relationship, opening the door to sudden ruptures with producers deemed risky, without giving them any chance to be heard or to propose corrective measures.
According to Oxfam France, thirty six of the thirty seven prior meetings held by the European commissioner responsible for the file were with company representatives, a figure the European Ombudsman is investigating without having confirmed it officially yet. European People’s Party group president Manfred Weber celebrated the result on his personal account as the end of European bureaucracy. Oxfam described it, from the other side, as an early Christmas for multinationals and the far right. Neither reaction occupied the space the migration debate held in those same days.
The coffee that needs coordinates
More than nine thousand kilometres from Brussels, in the Colombian department of Huila, roughly 86,000 coffee growing families have faced since this year a requirement born from none of those votes, yet connected to them with precision. The European deforestation regulation, distinct from the due diligence directive but part of the same regulatory architecture under the European Green Deal, has demanded since this year exact GPS coordinates for every productive plot so that Colombian coffee, cocoa, palm oil or beef can keep entering the European market. Naming the village or the municipality is no longer enough. The producer must demonstrate, with satellite precision down to at least six decimal places of latitude and longitude, that his crop did not expand over forest after December 2020.
Coffee, cocoa, palm oil and cattle together account for more than three billion dollars in annual Colombian exports to the European Union, according to figures from the agro export sector cited by specialised press. Huila alone concentrates nearly two million bags of coffee a year, nineteen per cent of national production, spread across 86,000 families and 148,000 cultivated hectares. The National Federation of Coffee Growers has had to build, under pressure, its own georeferencing system covering the entire national coffee belt, update more than 50,000 personal data authorisations, and train tens of thousands of producers in the use of satellite imagery and digital platforms that many had never needed before in order to sell their crop.
The commercial director of the Colombian mission to the European Union has publicly insisted the country cannot afford to ease its preparations, while large international buyers such as Nestlé, Unilever and Cargill begin unifying traceability requirements across their entire supply chains, regardless of the product’s final destination. That means even cooperatives and traders who do not export directly to Europe are beginning to face the same documentary demands, through sheer commercial contagion. Industry associations such as Analdex have called for closer coordination between the public and private sectors precisely so these new agro exports are not jeopardised by a regulatory shift decided thousands of kilometres away, in an institution where Colombian producers have no seat and no vote.
Coffee, cocoa, palm oil and cattle account for more than three billion dollars in annual Colombian exports to the European Union, while in Huila alone roughly 86,000 coffee growers must georeference their plots to keep that market.
This is where the asymmetry rarely named in these terms appears. The Colombian producer bears, plot by plot, the technical and administrative cost of proving his environmental innocence. The European company that buys that coffee, at the other end of the same chain, sees its own legal obligation to monitor what happens at the chain’s most distant links shrink in those very same months.
The burden goes down. The accountability goes up less and less.
The pincer
No conspiracy is needed for two legislative processes to converge this way. It is enough that they share the same political majority and the same calendar. While European public opinion spends weeks discussing the fate of those trying to enter the continent, attention runs short for watching what leaves it, the obligations being loosened for those already inside who benefit from supply chains crossing the Atlantic.
The mechanism needs no concealment, because no one is looking at that side of the board. Every MEP voting in favour of an Omnibus can explain the decision in terms of industrial competitiveness, administrative simplification, relief for small and medium European businesses, and at some point in that explanation will even be right. The problem does not lie in the technical argument, which is plausible and sometimes true, but in what that argument allows to go unwatched while it is being debated, the silent transfer of an obligation from one continent to another, from a company headquartered in Brussels to a farming family in Huila that was never consulted about either vote. Brussels gets to debate compliance costs in the abstract. Huila gets the satellite coordinates.
The coffee grower in Huila does not need to know the exact composition of the coalition that passed Omnibus I in order to feel its effect. The new coordinate requirement that reached his farm this year is enough…
G.S.
