Eduardo González
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced yesterday, during the inauguration of the IV Congress of the Business Council Alliance for Ibero-America (CEAPI), that next June 8 he will begin a tour of Argentina and Costa Rica, accompanied by “important companies”, within the strategy of the Executive to help refloat the Spanish and Ibero-American economy and recover the levels of trade and investment “prior to the pandemic”.
“Spain maintains close historical relations with Ibero-America” and this is reflected in the “complete mobilization and presence of the Spanish Government in recent years”, said the President of the Government during the opening of the Congress, held at the Caixa Forum headquarters in Madrid under the slogan Transformation and social impact: the best companies for the planet.
“I would like to take this opportunity to announce that in June I will begin a tour of Latin America accompanied by important companies”, continued Pedro Sánchez. “The tour will take place between June 8 and 11 and will begin in Argentina, a country with which Spain has enormous economic and commercial ties” and whose president, Alberto Fernández, made an official visit to Spain last week in which he addressed the need to “seize the moment to renew the strategic partnership”, added the chief executive.
The trip will conclude between June 10 and 11 in Costa Rica, where he will meet with “the main leaders of the Central American region to address bilateral issues, the drama of refugees, the challenge of migration, displacements aggravated by the pandemic and the consequences of climate change, such as hurricanes”, he added. This tour comes to complete the one he already started in the summer of 2018, when he visited Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Costa Rica, and the trips made to the region in the run-up to the pandemic, such as Mexico, Cuba or Guatemala to participate in the Ibero-American Summit.
During the rest of his speech, Sánchez warned that economic relations between Spain and Ibero-America “have been affected as a result of the pandemic”, but “collaboration between Spain and Ibero-America is capable of resisting this adverse situation, unprecedented in the history of humanity”. According to the President of the Government, the internationalization of the Spanish economy is “essential in this phase of recovery” and, for this reason, “Latin America occupies a prominent place” as one of the main destinations “for Spanish companies in the coming years” in the new Plan for the internationalization of the economy, approved last week by the Council of Ministers. “Our will is to recover the levels of exchange prior to the pandemic”, he assured.
Pedro Sánchez again insisted on the need to promote universal access to vaccines, because “the best national and international economic policy is vaccination and recovery is not possible without mass vaccination”. “Spain is the best ally of Ibero-America in this field”, said the President of the Government, who assured that the decision of his Executive, announced at the recent Ibero-American Summit in Andorra, to allocate to Ibero-American countries between 5 and 10% of the vaccines that Spain receives in 2021 has not received “any opposition from any political party; on the contrary, they have applauded and supported it”. On the other hand, Pedro Sánchez reiterated his call to international financial institutions and development banks to “take into account the unique reality of the countries in the region, especially middle-income countries”, and to create “new instruments or adapt those that already exist so that middle-income countries can have access to financing”.
Grynspan, Claver-Carone, Iglesias and Gurría
In the first panel of the Congress, the Ibero-American Secretary General, Rebeca Grynspan, warned that “each quarter of delay in vaccinations means, for the growth perspective of the region, more than two points of loss of economic recovery”, so she urged to improve the international COVAX system, which “only guarantees 20% of the vaccines to developing countries”, and claimed that the “important” announcement of Spain is “to be followed by the rest of the countries”. She also called for the strengthening of “multilateral development banking” and proposed that the countries that do not require the special drawing rights recently announced by the IMF, such as the EU, the United States and China, “cede what corresponds to them” to the countries that do need them.
For his part, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the American (of Spanish origin) Mauricio Claver-Carone, assured that the entity he presides is “the first and only international financial system that has created mechanisms to assume risks between countries and pharmaceutical companies” with a view to the purchase of vaccines. “We want to be treated as a buyer in order to be able to distribute them, because the longer vaccination is delayed, the longer the recovery will take”, he warned. He also admitted that “the special drawing rights are a line of credit that will allow a monetary strengthening”, but the important thing is “how we put the money to work”, for which the IDB offers itself as a “deposit to monetize that money, scale it up and carry out projects”.
The honorary president of CEAPI, Enrique V. Iglesias, warned that “the most important challenge in Latin America is to find mature political systems that offer society the measures that interest everyone”, for which it is necessary to promote “alliances and great agreements between governments, companies and civil society” and that political systems “do not waste time in discussions that lead nowhere”. Closing this first panel, the Secretary General of the OECD, Ángel Gurría, declared that “the Ibero-American business sector has to be the driving force behind the recovery” after COVID, because “we are talking about amounts that exceed many times the capacity of governments, which have suffered an increase of between 15 and 20% of debt in relation to GDP”.
The first day concluded with a dinner at which the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Pablo Hernández de Cos, spoke. The Congress will conclude today with speeches by, among others, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya; the Fourth Vice-President and Minister for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera; the leader of the PP, Pablo Casado; former Prime Minister José María Aznar; the Secretary General of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), Zurab Pololikashvili; the Mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida; the President of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce, José Luis Bonet; and the President of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi. Finally, the Congress will be closed by King PhilipVI.
