Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero on Tuesday called for rebalancing the trade agreement between the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the European Union (EU), saying the South American bloc “ceded much more” than the EU in the deal signed in 2019.
“We want a revised agreement that balances the two regions and that allows our region to have quality jobs, which come from investment, development and knowledge,” Cafiero said in a statement.
Mercosur, which gathers Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and the EU agreed to the trade deal in June 2019 following 20 years of negotiations, though the document still needs to be ratified by the respective legislatures.
But in a move that opened up the text to revision, the EU introduced a new stipulation to the deal earlier this year that calls for sanctions on countries that fail to meet environmental goals.
Other Mercosur countries have also expressed concern over the EU change.
“The European Union has approved its own laws with extraterritorial effects that modify the balance of the agreement. These initiatives represent potential restrictions on agricultural and industrial exports from Brazil,” Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in June after a meeting with European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen.
On Monday, Cafiero and his Mercosur counterparts met with Executive Vice President of the European Commission and Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis.
The meeting took place within the framework of the Third Summit of the EU and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a two-day event held in Brussels.
