The European Union (EU) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) will hold, on Monday and Tuesday (17 and 18), a summit meeting in Brussels under the shadow of an issue of difficult solution: the trade agreement between the European bloc and Mercosur.
Negotiations have dragged on since 1999 and, despite an announcement of a principle of understanding in 2019, diplomats and negotiators on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to overcome important obstacles.
The Brussels summit will not focus specifically on the agreement between the EU and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), as it is destined to political relations between the European bloc and the 33-nation CELAC group.
However, although the negotiations involve only four of the 33 CELAC countries, the summit was seen as the ideal stage for the EU and Mercosur to finally consecrate the agreement, a possibility that now seems increasingly distant.
Spain, which took over the rotating presidency of the EU Council on July 1, insisted that rapprochement with the CELAC countries was a priority, and hoped the Brussels summit would set the stage for an announcement.
However, faced with the stagnation of talks and the real prospect that an agreement is still far away, a senior Spanish diplomat warned that the Brussels meeting “will be a political summit, not a negotiation summit”.
For Ambassador Gustavo Pandiani, Undersecretary for Latin American Affairs at the Argentine Foreign Ministry, the meeting in Brussels will be about “consultations and political dialogue, on broad political lines”. “We are not going to talk about tariffs”, he stressed.
“Someone announced four years ago that we had a deal, and now we’re still discussing it. So it’s likely that we didn’t have an agreement at that time,” he pointed out.
Therefore, when asked about what his country expected from this summit in relation to the agreement, Pandiani said “not much, because the summit is not the place to negotiate trade, but a political forum”.
In France, a source from the Ministry of Economy noted that “the country’s position is clear: we are waiting for guarantees, especially in environmental matters”. […] For now, we don’t feel there’s much progress on this issue.”
– Comings and goings –
In June 2019, during a G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, the EU and Mercosur announced a principle of agreement, amid widespread relief after 20 years of negotiations.
However, difficulties did not take long to appear, and the process again became blocked.
The first alarm sounded with the management of the then president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, regarding the environment in general and the Amazon rainforest in particular.
Furthermore, in 2020, the EU adopted its Green Deal, a strict and ambitious set of rules to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
In this context, several European countries began to demand that the EU incorporate a special chapter on environmental protection in the agreement, to prevent the promotion of deforestation in Mercosur for the benefit of the export of agricultural products.
After numerous comings and goings, the EU presented Mercosur, in March of this year, a set of proposals for this additional instrument on environmental commitments.
However, the proposal was poorly received, especially by Brazil, considering that it transformed voluntary targets into binding ones in the light of international pacts, and exposed the country to sanctions in case of non-compliance.
The parties scheduled a meeting for June 26 to discuss Mercosur’s counterproposal. However, after some delays, the appointment ended up being cancelled.
Brazil announced that it is finalizing the details of its counterproposal, which must still be discussed with Mercosur partners before being presented to the EU.
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